3. The Warmth of the Son…

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I started this writing project while on a family vacation in Kauai, Hawaii. There’s something altogether asynchronous about starting a writing project in which “Death” (CUE: lightning and thunder, morose music, Death’s bony finger pointing at my chest) is the first theme while sitting on a chair not 100 yards from both the Pacific Ocean and the sound of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” playing over some speakers in the distance. I can hear and see families outside my window swimming and laughing in the hotel pool and here I am writing about stuff that most of us spend most of our time avoiding until it arrives (expectedly or not) on our doorstep. But despite the messiness of the idea of all of that, this trip has been illuminating on where I am in 2023 as a person.

I like to say that my dad’s death in 2003 transformed me on a cellular level. I was one person at the start of January 28, 2003 and another person by the end of it. My whole paradigm shifted and changed in one beat of a heart, or a lack of one, as the case may be. It felt like my DNA did, too. Looking back at the two “me’s” of 2003, I recognize now that I became a little more cynical and a little more fatalistic. I started putting death on my dashboard as something I at least thought about daily, whereas before it was something that always existed in the abstract off on the horizon. I became a sadder person, overall. In several profound ways, January 2003 has never left me and I feel like an overall colder person temperamentally.

But looking back now, I also acknowledge that my dad’s death was a highly transformative event for me in making me a more whole, more empathetic person. I am probably a little more emotionally healthy person than I was before. I laugh as easily as I cry (and every emotion in between) and am not ashamed of any side of that. I’m more willing to share my emotions and feelings (on my terms) than I was before my dad passed. Because I know how quickly things can change, I don’t take as much stuff for granted as I did before. If I see you, I’m more likely to want to connect with you as a person than I was before. My fatalism that “it can all end suddenly” was also met with a coda of “so make it count.”

A couple of days ago, my family and I toured the Allerton botanical gardens here on the island. Typically, this kind of tour is not my jam, as I much more prefer to see nature on its terms than on a more encyclopedic trip, as this kind of was. I don’t need to know the names of the plants I’m looking at, let’s just go look at some plants. But boy am I glad I went. I think my dad’s death put the idea in my head that life is precious and brittle. What was once so vibrant and full of love can go away in an instant. If that idea was there before, it’s certainly dead and gone now. Nature isn’t brittle; nature is brutal. Life is stubborn.

Each of these islands was created by violent, catasrophic volcanic events happening both suddenly and slowly over many millions of years. And yet each of these islands is (or was before we got here) covered top to bottom with hard, stubborn green and brown life. Life took root after these violent events and just did. not. stop.

I’ve spent countless hours since 2003 wondering “what’s next” after all of this. Is there some kind of afterlife? What happens when we die? Do we just die and that’s it? On the spirit of that question, who knows? Either there’s “something” and we all find out in the end, or there’s “nothing” and we don’t. But on a more basic level, I know exactly what happens when we die. Life continues on. Stubborn, glorious, refuse-to-be-snuffed-out life continues. I sit here as proof of that. If you’ve lost anyone who’s near and dear to you and you’re reading this, you’re proof of that, too.

My internal alarm clock is still set for Central Standard Time and is basically set in stone. If I were here long enough, I’d chisel that down so that I get into a more natural sleep rhythm for the time zone. But a week? That’s barely enough time to change that internal clock of mine. So with that, I’ve caught every sunrise and every sunset. Watching that great, magnificent star of ours rise and set every day has felt like a way of connecting to everything around me that is good and right, but that exists beyond our capabilities of intellectually understanding.

My brain knows that it’s all just gravity and intergalactic parlor tricks. The sun rises over the fields of Idaho the same way it rises over the Pacific Ocean. I understand and acknowledge that irrefutable fact. And yet when the sun starts to set and the beautiful dark blue ocean turns a kind of tinty blue that stretches as far as the eye can see… …and when the sea waves start to not look like waves but like the earth inhaling and exhaling… and when the warmth of that brilliant yellowish red star hits my face, I feel connected in a way that seems to go beyond what my brain is telling me.

The light from the setting and rising sun always seems to be reflected right back to me in a way that feels like the unexplainable stuff we don’t know is pointing directly at me. In those instances, I’ve felt connected. I’ve felt connected to the cosmos we’re hurtling through. I’ve felt connected to the stubborn nature around me that pre-date me and will extend well beyond me.

And through this writing, I’ve felt connected to the grief and sadness that has partly defined my life over the past twenty years. If 2003 was a transformative event for me, which it was, then maybe this moment can be as equally transformative in a whole new direction. We’ll see. I feel like I’m ready.