"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain."
-- Emily Dickinson
I had just turned sixteen when my father shared this poem with me. Four months later, he was dead.
On that long-ago June morning, I stood looking at the body of the father I had loved so much, frantically attempting to absorb it all at once in an effort to remain sane, saying to myself over and over again, "You can handle this, you can handle this."
Behind those words I knew that a whole future had been annihilated and that in fact it was going to be very difficult to handle the coming days, weeks, months, and years.
Heartbroken frankly is too small a word to capture the sense of devastation. Among all the feelings that swam in my being that day, above all I felt keenly how my future was instantly and irrevocably altered. I could not conceive of a future without him but I had no choice but to begin to conceive of one. I had an intense desire to make it okay all at once somehow, to feel as if my life and my future had not been destroyed, that my heart was not broken. But of course it wasn't okay, and I had to survive somehow without dying inside.
He was a good father -- not a slacker father, not an absent father. A father who took me horsebackriding in the Santa Monica Mountains. A father who took me to the Sierra Nevada, camping under the immensity of star-packed heavens. A father who spoke in loving tones. A father who was fun, who all my friends wanted to come along on the Girl Scout camping trips because he was so much fun. A father who read poetry aloud beside a blazing winter fire with classical music playing in the background. A father who instilled in me forever a love of the outdoors and of culture in all its forms. A father who taught me how to live even as he suffered from depression.
A fainting robin father, as it turned out.
Tending a broken heart was the task of my future. At first there seemed to be no hope. But as time slowly crawled by and the painful immediacy of grief lay further and further in the past (yes, time is the great healer), I learned in future days that the heart does mend, that it does heal strongly in all the broken places, and that there may indeed also be a greater capacity for joy, because the sadness and the suffering and the loss have cut so deep.
But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes allow myself to wonder what times we might have shared in the future - something as simple as a conversation on the phone with my dad. I still miss him every day. I've just learned to live with the missing.
This is a deeply personal post, I realize, but I have been haunted by melancholy ever since I learned that Heath Ledger had died. Although I did not know him personally, I am of course affected by the premature death of a young father - who also happened to be an immense talent of aching complexity, who was not likely a suicide, but who placed himself so closely to danger that a tragic accident was made possible. I cannot help but feel tremendous compassion when Michelle Williams publicly says, "My heart is broken." It takes courage to admit that even to yourself, let alone to a faceless mob. You are at the crossroads of the darkest night, having to reimagine your future without the one you loved ever again in the days to come.
So this post is dedicated to Matilda, who lost her father at the threshold of memory, and to Michelle, her mother, who has promised that "she will be raised with the best memories of him." Those best memories take on an extraordinary power throughout the future, literally keeping you afloat in times when your heart feels it is sinking with despair.
God bless.
