Loss and Death...

"So it is…that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed."
- taken from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

"Every shadow no matter how deep is threatened by morning light."
- Grand Inquisitor Silecio in the movie The Fountain

Most of the time when I write these posts I sit down and the words materialize as if the ideas had a mind of their own. The past month this has not been the case. I've tried several times to sit down and write, but the words have come slowly and rarely with any importance attached to them. At best, the material that has formulated has been completely superficial--a post in the hopper about buying a vintage watch on eBay--or incomplete. I've been sitting infront of the computer for a good forty minutes now, wondering what's got my literary plumbing backed up. I've debated about whether or not I would write about this, but at the very worst I will just delete the post.

Since the end of December of 2008, I've been having a hard time dealing with the man who contributed the DNA which brought me into this world and his rampant alcoholism. Over the holidays a few people asked about him, how he was doing, and commented on what a great guy he was. I wish I could have said that I agreed with them. After dealing with the antics of his drinking for the past four years along with other spots of heavy drinking on his part during my formative years I don't even know who my father is anymore.

I don't think that it's an accident that I started to wear a suit to work in December of last year or develop a fascination about what men were like during the 1950s and 1960s over the past two years. As the image of my father as a person has been washed away more and more, I have become more and more interested in looking and feeling like a man and not a boy. The hair cuts have happened more and more frequently, my professional dress is more traditional, and I have started to carry myself in such a way that gives me more gravitas in the workplace. My father may be drifting out of my life, and I think I am compensating for it by making myself into the man that he never was--or at least the man that I can't remember him ever being.

Upon returning home from Christmas vacation at Aunt Shelly's, I watched the movie The Fountain. Before I saw the movie a friend of mine said that it was very existential. That may have been the case, but I thought that the movie was simply about a man who was dealing with the impending doom of losing his wife--a person he deeply loved--and along with dealing with the pain of losing her has to confront his own mortality. My father is still alive, and no longer a part of my life. And maybe this is why the whole thing sucks so bad: even though he is alive he is lost to me and may never come back. From my perspective this is the worst reality that a person can create for themself: to be dead to the world, yet still be alive.

Over the past few years I have come up with answers to solve my daily problems. The answers usually come down to aphorisms that I repeat in my mind like, "Work slow." This issue doesn't have any solution to it. If you don't feel the frustration and the pain, then the person in question really is dead. Maybe somethings in life don't have answers at all. Maybe something are just meant to be lived with.