Family is only for a brief time. It’s a loving passage. It doesn’t always feel good, nor does it have to. And the funny thing about this message is that, only those who have witnessed this can recognize it, and those who have not cannot comprehend, because they haven’t experienced it, so the words don’t ring the same way. We can’t acknowledge this message before loss, only after.
I knew I would lose my father, I knew that some day my grand parents would die, and so on. I’d prepare, and sometimes be nostalgic by contemplating the fleeting time I had left with my dad for example. I knew the time would come where the inevitable would happen. But, only after his departure, nearly a year now, can I see certain things for myself.
And despite all and any attempts to percieve things the way I see them now, I couldn’t possibly contemplate how I’d perceive life, and ‘become’ after his departure.
Which brings me to the inevitable: we live a wonderful life, full of pains, and frustrations, surrounded by family entities, and sometimes family members we hate. We take that presence, whether good or bad, for granted. I like to describe it as free-love. People who love you, despite all and everything. They’re just there, no matter what. They are like the walls in your house, you don’t have to wonder about them, they’re just there. Even across sea’s. We perceive them as everlasting, continual, constant.
And so, come good, come bad, come up, come down, come snow, come rain… they are there, and we don’t know any different. How could we know any different, we haven’t experienced a life without them. The only life we know is with them, somewhere.
Until, the inevitable happens. And then, the warmth, the guidance (even misguidance), the exchange, the concern, the witness and witnessed, the observer, the loving presence, is no longer. It’s just quiet, silent, peaceful, nothing.
No one outside of your life knows, no one is any better off, but suddenly, that one part of your life simply doesn’t exist. As if you drive on a road every single day of your life, then suddenly the road is closed, and gets removed from existence, you can no longer take that road to go converse and exchange, be seen, anything. Gone.
The life you know, the exchanges you’ve had, the people… no longer exist. An entire personal support system falls apart over-night. An entire way of functioning, of exchanging, of being within a family unit. Rendered void over night. This isn’t good or bad, it’s simply new, different, other. An inevitable adaptation. Kind of like if your leg gets chopped off in an accident, you just have to accept that the way you’ve lived is gone and you have to move on to live differently now. It just is.
Now, I say all of this without any attached emotion, I feel like I’ve been over my attachments and my pains and so on. No, I’m saying all of this as an observation, that the way we believe life is, in our entitled little bubble of complacent self-centeredness, isn’t our fault. It’s a guiding force, a buffet if you will, of experiences, characters, and love, to show us who and what we want to experience. It gives us keys, and pieces of our puzzle so that we can decipher who we are. All the while preventing us from fully stepping into our entirety.
I believe that, a man can’t fully become a man, until his father is no longer in charge. This can be through death, or perhaps simply stepping aside as the natural order happens. Though, however this comes to pass, a man is only in his fathers shadow until the time comes for him to grow into his shoes. And that can only happen when he is faced with himself, with all the responsibilities his father carried before him, and most everything he was unaware of beforehand. I believe a man becomes a man, the day he suddenly has to face life full on with no one to help him but his will and his courage.
Cherokee.blog 