My mother made her departure in 1992. I was just thirty. Funny thing about doomed cancer sufferers: we tend to mourn them while they are still living, agonizing through the disease’s progressions. I did not shed a single tear at her funeral.
The year was 2008; I was rummaging through a basement closet, a place where objects of old go to die. Meanwhile, across town, in a classroom, sat my twelve-year-old son. I bumped into a stack of games that had once amused and captured the imagination of a toddler; my clumsiness set off a jingle made possible by batteries inserted ten years prior. The jingle was distorted but I remembered it well. In that moment, with a garbled tune echoing from a box, I realized my mother never knew my son. Each stage of infancy prepares us for the next; then comes toddlerhood and boyhood; there is nary a moment to consider what might be missing. But in that moment, alone in a basement, smacked with the reality of all the life my mother missed, every tear I failed to shed at a funeral gushed like a dam that had broken.
My father outlived my mother but was not long for the world. As was the case with my mother, I did not shed a tear at his funeral.
As a boy, I played guitar, mainly classical and some Beatles. My father brought home a piece of sheet music. “Play this; it’s a good song,” he had enthusiastically intoned. Like a brattish ten-year-old, I scoffed at the idea and refused. A week later, when alone, I set aside my childish attitude and strummed the strains of a tune that went straight to my heart in a way like few songs have. The song was Wichita Lineman. A year after my father’s passing, I heard it playing and, as I had in a basement with a garbled jingle in my ear, I went to pieces.
Often, the significant moments of our lives, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings setting off a chain of events, are akin to puffs of air that float past us; they require a rearview mirror and the wisdom to intuit our life as a continuum. Then there are those moments that hit like a fist and remind us we become who we are through the love we have for others.
Michael's Corner 
Leave a comment