My father died this month. Every time I’ve told a white person this, they’ve launched into a full-throated and rather lengthy monologue about grief and loss and heartbreak. And every time I’ve told a nonwhite person about this, they’ve said “I’m so sorry” and then asked me what my relationship with him was like. I’m not sure what that means.
The truth is I lost my father a long time ago in a lot of ways. So mourning has been weird. Because there is no funeral tradition to mourn the loss of someone you never really had to begin with. See, shit like that is why I’m always making up my own ways to do things.
This is Pure Ghost Radio, the audio version of taking a walk because you can’t sleep. I’m Carvell Wallace.
This is the second full moon in the month of May, the first was on May 1. This one rose at about 8:15 Eastern time and hit complete fullness at around 2:45am Pacific. This means that if you caught the moon soon after its rise you probably saw a big beautiful thing sitting on the horizon looking like you almost almost touch it. This is the Blue Moon, the one you hear so much about, The one that songs and movies and breweries take their name from, the one in the phrase “once in a Blue Moon”
When I was a kid, I thought “Once in a Blue Moon” was a phrase because the moon would randomly turn blue on very rare occasions and so whatever was being described happened with that same infrequency. And I thought the moon turned blue just because it was tired of not being blue, just because it wanted to mix it up, just because it had free will and didn’t want to be forced into being regular boring moon color if it didn’t have to be.
Unsurprisingly I related to the personality of this moon (that I made up in my head) I didn’t want to be forced into being anything forever. I wanted freedom to change, to transform, to transition from old versions of myself into new versions.
My father and I didn’t have the greatest relationship. Most of the time when people say that, they’re saying there was conflict or abuse, cruelty, or hard feelings. But our relationship didn’t have that. Instead it had nothing. It had periodic phone calls where we talked in broad maxims about life and told each other that we loved each other. I rarely admitted to him that I was struggling with anything unless that struggle could be folded into a general narrative about how “life is full of challenges we must face” He never told me that he was upset with me or disappointed in me or a choice I’ve made. He told my son once that according to his religious understanding of the world, homosexuality meant that you were going to hell and there was no two ways about it. My son told me this after he had gone to spend two weeks with my dad once summer when he was about fourteen.
Given that I’m something of a homosexual myself, this caused me to have some feelings. But it also explained a lot. It made things make sense. I get why he feels like *a* father but not exactly like *my* father. I get why I’ve had the thought ever since I was about 6 years old, that if my father and I were in elementary school at the same time, he would have bullied me. There’s no evidence to back that up, of course. Just a feeling. But I have to think that feeling that way about your father probably means something.
I also picked up some feelings when my brother told me that he mentioned to my father that my memoir Another Word For Love contained some significant episodes of childhood struggle and asked if he wanted to hear about them. No, my father reportedly said. I don’t have any interest in that.
It was around this time that it dawned on me that at the time when most of the childhood difficulties described in my book were happening, my father was six miles away from me and was also nowhere to be found.
I don’t know why I had never thought of that before, before his life was nearly at an end. I guess sometimes we just seal the door shut that leads down certain hallways of thought. This also explains why I was in my mid thirties before it dawned on me that me and my father look nothing alike. This idea solidified for me at a funeral for my aunt on my mother’s side which was less than a year after I became a father myself.
All of this may also explain why I’m always making up my own way to do things. Because I have a lot of things to avoid.
Another interesting thing about my father is that he was one of the best people that everyone knew. He volunteered in his faith community and in his neighborhood. He helped people out right up until he couldn’t get out of bed. He was honored by the county for his service to the youth. He probably saved more lives that a lot of doctors by simply mentoring, intervening, caring for, taking in, guiding, and creating programs and foster home for students with disabilities in and around the Washington DC Metro Area.
They say the contractor’s home repairs are never quite finished.
When I posted about his death on Instagram, AI was quick to intervene and offer up, unprompted, a paragraph about the grandeur of his legacy. I was, in many ways, alone in my experience of him. No one else who really had it. Not even AI knows what I’m talking about.
I think life is weird and scary and there is no parent who is going to come and save you. You, for better or for worse, are your own savior. I know that sounds like capitalist hyper-individualism. But here’s why it’s not.
