On "a certain number of times."

 

It's been a pretty grim week.  First, there was the sad story of father and son Mark and Travis Macy, two racers in the Eco-Challenge Fiji.  Mark was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease a few months before entering the race.  The father and son team deal with the physical and mental challenges of the race as they come to terms with the reality that their family life will change.   I'm thinking about my dad and my son Henry while watching.

Then, I'm reading Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.  There are so many lines about the temporariness of life and possibility of unexpected death.  It's part of her plan to juxtapose images and highlight unexpected collisions.  And it's impossible for me to read a single page without being reminded of her own untimely death just a few years after she wrote the book (as well as her terribly sad, and touching "Modern Love" piece for the New York Times "You May Want To Marry My Husband.")

And, though I read it at least thirty years ago, these lines from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles return to me now:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

And last night I had a terrible dream about my son Henry.  My son's therapist called me in tears.  He said that Henry was in the hospital.  That he was on suicide watch.  And he was intubated.  I kept asking questions in the phone, but the therapist was sobbing and unable to answer. 

There's just a special sadness from Rosenthal's book and my memory of Bowles' book because, since Henry has been living with his mom and rarely choosing to see me or talk to me, I'm sad that I'm missing out on spending time with him, that I'm not able to fulfill my responsibilities as a dad (especially as I get leaks of information that he's struggling and sad and making bad decisions), and that it's all more piercing because these are days that we will never get back. 

Today I was thinking about how personality is not necessarily set for all times, but -- especially during late teenage years -- the paths of personality are getting worn into the dirt.  And these years for him have been a struggle, have been mostly sad.  He's been getting "fathering" from neighborhood kids that he hangs out with.  I regret not having the opportunity to give him relief, to guide him.  

I moved out of the house when there were still plenty of available times (a large "certain number of times" in Bowles' words) that we could have spent valuable time together talking, hanging out, sharing interests, continuing our quest to find the best burger in Chicago.  I had planned another hiking trip to New Hampshire with him.  But things didn't happen that way.  And that year is now gone.