Father-Loss, a personal note on losing a friend: stoies not told and songs never sung..

April 10, 2007
Mark, Tom, Nancy, Norma, Justin, and Beverly:

Whether or not I can deliver this note, I need to write it.
I cannot believe how much grief I have had, how much and often I have wept.
I know it is not just losing John, but some of my own losses in life.
I have been grieving for all that was lost in the way John was,
how he lessened his pain and hid from his own fear and
how that was intimately connected to his own family life..

We humans do what we need to do to hide from our pain and fears.
It is a survival method, long ago learned, thousands of years.
When those lions, tigers and bears appeared at the mouth of the cave,
it was not the humans who panicked who survived.

John’s way shows me, in a revelation I have never quite yet had,
why my father could not, would not relate to me
with so much pain in that. For both of us.

\I have wept so many times in the past month that I cannot believe it.
But it is not just for John, but for also for me.
When I think of all that John, and Norma and Justin missed
--so unnecessarily, tears just flow, once again --dammit.

I know there is ego in my tears, that I am also weeping for
all my lost loves and losses, unmentionable ones , too, just as John’s were.

John had it in him to write the great new American novel,
full of humor, irony, playfulness and laughter at the absurdity
of our human condition. He had walked through so much
pain in his work life. And now we know
how much more pain in his personal life. Finally.

I kept teasing him, prodding him to get started, do some pages every day.
I do not think he ever did. Or if he did he never told me.

I know why I can’t stop hurting for Justin.
When I saw the Field of Dreams movie, I could not stay in the theater for weeping
when the ghost of his father asked his son to play catch. . ..
My father never tried to play with me. I do not think he knew how.
What was striking was that a year or two later, I saw Field on TV
and I said that damn scene will not catch me this time the way it did the first time.
But the damn thing did and once more I had to leave the room for sobbing.

So it is not just John and Justin I am weeping for.
I have a group of inmates at the county jail, Paschal’s rascals, I call them.
It is the same for them. Father -loss is the great unmentionable taboo
in our male society, and, possibly, I happen to believe, why we have so much
violence. Consider the man n the White House
and his delusions and what it has cost the world and all of us.

There is a story about a woman who had a story and a song that kept returning in her dreams, but she could never tell or sing it. One night while she was sleeping, the story came out of her open mouth. The story became a pair of men’s shoes by her bed, and the song came out and became a cloak hung in the parlor. When she woke up she was astonished. She did not now where they came from. Her husband came home and accused her of having a man visitor and when she denied it, he left. The rest of the story doesn’t matter here.

I believe we all have a story, one that is hard to tell, because we all have closets, closed spaces within ourselves where we harbor and hide our fears and scares about ourselves. If we cannot ever tell our story, I believe we cannot ever sing the song that the Dream of God had intended for us to sing. That was pressed on our lips before we were born.

There is a beautiful, unique, never-before-heard melody each of us is meant to sing, with our lives and our hearts. The great summons in life and life and life’s pain, is to find, uncover that one precious song that had been given to us alone long ago..

To do that we have to risk the vulnerability of finding someone to tell our story to. Until we risk that, any singing will be off - key, falteringly, if we sing at all.

I have talked with Norma several times and Mark once. I really love all of you people who have loved John so much. I am so deeply grateful to each of you that there is no way in words that I can express my heart. Each of you, Beverly, Nancy, Mark, Tom and Justin, you sang a song of love to John. We each know there were times when that was not easy to do. (Smile, please!)

Norma suggested yesterday that we might want to have a memorial here some day in the woods near the pond where John and I walked and talked. You will remember he wanted his memorial to be here, but for the sake of those who wanted and needed to honor his life, Tom’s church was better.

Let us plan to do that here sometime. Maybe it would also help me--and there come the bloody tears again, once more, dammit. O John, you don’t know how you have helped ME. Yes, you do. I know you do. You help me grieve for all the father loss among males in our bruised society.

Friends of John, thanks for listening to this ancient and wounded warrior still bleeding and bandaged, but also grateful for the risk and love that brought Norma and Jay back into his life and the healing that was possible, not only through them, but through all of us, for John.

Thank each of you for the love you offered my friend. I have been deeply touched by your love for him. Sincerely. Namaste.
Paschal.