The Returning LIght

THE RETURNING LIGHT

After weeks of what seemed like endless rain - gray days with sudden downpours that faded into sheets of mist that clung to the windshield of my Jeep. This morning the sky has cleared, a deep blue with small puffs of cloud that float by on the wind, casting their brief shadows across the hillsides.

Yesterday, I traveled back to this place I once called home. After a night of fitful sleep in my hotel room, I’m driving out to the edge of the salt marsh, the place where I used to feel safe against the misplaced wrath of my father. All those times I would run out of the house, jump on my bike and fly over the three miles from our house to this place. I open the door of my Jeep and breathe in the forgotten memory of sea air, alive this morning with the sounds of a flurry of gulls.

I stand for a long while gazing out across the marsh, before settling on an old wooden bench, still damp with the traces of last night’s thunderstorm. The tide is out, the only sea birds so far in the distance they appear as small specks on the horizon, the pure white of a few snowy egrets illuminated in the morning sun like tiny pinpoints of light. Nearby, just visible above the mossy branches of a carefully braided osprey nest , I see a female osprey patiently warming what I imagine are her trio of speckled eggs.

Being back here at the marsh has pulled me out of the foggy hibernation of the past two weeks, into this morning, one I’ve imagined countless times since the call from my mother delivered the news I’ve spent years dreaming to hear. My father is dying. He wants to see you, my mother told me, and because I love her, I have agreed to come.

These past weeks, I found myself rehearsing what I might say when I’m finally face to face with him. And yet, the confidence I imagined seems to escape me now that the day has arrived. It’s evidently far easier to plan a confrontation, than to willingly walk into it. I have to remind myself that years have passed. I am an adult now. At least, he’ll no longer be able to physically tower over me like he once did, but still, I am well acquainted with the ways his words can rise up unbidden from the silent depths of my past to remind me of the countless ways I continued to fall short in his eyes.

I wasn’t expecting how being back here would deliver an encyclopedia of hurtful memories I thought I’d left behind. Another one arrives as I sit looking out across the marsh. There was this dance contest at our town park over the summer months during middle school. Just learning to play the saxophone and fancying myself a budding musician, I had entered. After rounds of elimination, the 50 entrants had been reduced to two finalists, and I found myself in the final dance-off. I remember that when my name was announced as the winner, a crowd of the popular girls had gathered around me cheering. It was one of the high points of my school years, but it was short-lived, thanks to my father.

When I got home that evening with the small trophy I’d been awarded, all my father said was, “Dancing? That’s what you’re good at? If you ask me, it’s an embarrassment, so don’t think you’re going to put that thing out here where people can see it. If I were you, I’d hide it in the back of my closet and forget it ever happened.”

And then on its heels, I remember another time, that was one of the toughest challenges I faced in high school, and yes, it was about a girl. Her name was Andrea. I guess you could say she was my first love, and she had just broken up with me. Sure, I was young, but I was also crazy about her, and at the time, the pain of losing her, well, it felt devastating. I remember wondering if I could go on after that. It seems a little over dramatic through the lens of time, but I can still remember those nights of anguish behind the closed door of my bedroom and how my father had finally opened the door, looked at me with disgust on his face and said, “Get used to it, Kevin. It won’t be the last time you lose at love and just open your eyes. You’re far from the brightest star in the sky.”

Years of therapy helped me finally see that my father’s toxicity was never really about me.And that was when I finally put enough distance between us to escape the power of relentless rejection. You know, I always assumed my mother had her own reasons for staying which I can’t say I understand, but I’ve never seen the benefit of judging her. I send her a yearly plane ticket to visit, and she always comes, leaving my father alone to fend for himself for a few days. I guess it’s her respite from the life she’s chosen with him, but for me, it’s been years since I returned to his house, or had a word to speak to him. So I tossed and turned in my hotel last night, imagining my father now older, now weakened with age, but I don’t doubt still capable of the vitriol in which he is uniquely skilled.

Just then, a pair of red-winged blackbirds darts by, navigating through the branches of a young maple that stands at the edge of the path leading down to the marsh’s edge. Standing, I start down the path, where the sodden earth sucks at my boots and flings droplets of mud onto my bare legs. At the tide line, I have this sudden memory of something I read a long time ago. It was about an ancient indigenous practice among the Cheyenne called the Death Lodge. When a tribal elder sensed that death was near, he would take up residence in a little house away from the village where he could attend to final matters that needed to be done. He would focus on reviewing his life, repairing or completing his relationships and preparing to move from this life into the mystery beyond.

Today, we seem to lack the wisdom of any formal practice that gives space for end-of-life reflection or making amends, and I have my doubts that the man who fathered me is even capable of that. I realize that I am heading for today’s version of a Death Lodge. My father is not at the home I refuse to enter; he is spending his final days at a hospice just a few miles away from here. I’m not so deluded as to hope for a final word of wisdom or a long overdue apology from him. But what do I want? Why did I choose to come back here to face him?

What seems clear is that I have been reminded of the trepidation and fear that once characterized my interactions with him, but that I’m a different person than I used to be. I agreed to come here, and not just to honor my mother’s wishes or so my father could berate me one more time. Instead, it’s because I am realizing that these rapidly turning pages of old memories signify something, like the final pages of a book I want to set down and walk away from. And I understand for the first time that I actually have something to say to him, though it isn’t what I imagined during my solitary rehearsals back home.

This is my opportunity to take that final step capable of setting me free. Because it hasn’t been the things he did, the choices he made, or even the places where he was the one who fell short. No, it became all the ways I held on to my own anger, my disgust with him, my indictment of who he was as a father – those were the things that imprisoned me in this tiny room where he now lies dying. The passing of time has given me the courage to meet him on a wholly different level, and now the door to that room has been opened. As unexpected as this seems even to me, I know now that the way out is by giving him an honest expression of my forgiveness, forgiveness for all the ways he fell short, all the words he uttered that cut through my budding identity like knives, all the ways he wasn’t what I believed and wanted him to be as a father. And it will no longer matter how or what he says in response, because I am doing this for me and not for him.

A few feet away, a dragonfly suspends itself momentarily in the sunlight before darting away. The female osprey’s mate alights on the nest with a morning meal of flounder in its talons for her. It feels like I see the expanse of morning sky and all the life around me with new eyes, free for the first time from the taint of a past I have carried on my back for a very long time. I am ready now, and I turn and walk back up the path towards my Jeep. Today, I will enter my father’s Death Lodge for a meeting that has been mysteriously transformed from ominous to jubilant.

Submitted by: Raina Tiven; 1,606 words