Acre Under a Green Sky

On the way to the airport, I had Dan take me to my father's gravesite. I was already experiencing the liberation of being an orphan and I wanted to feel that terrible closeness one last time. Dan waited for me in the car.

The gravesite was meant to be for both of them, but he lay there alone just as he had lain alone for forty years. Not far away, Luka lay with his family –– together for eternity. It didn't seem fair.

Dan and Ruth had kept their promise to my father and to themselves. They clung fast to him till the end. They subjugated their lives to him so that he might never feel abandoned again. Their choice was clear. But what about me?

I mark all the terrible changes in my life to that night at the Farm. Bitterness and terror and hatred made a nest in my heart that night and some part of me stopped growing. I saw my father strike my mother down for the first time, and I grew tall being stuck in that moment –– paralyzed by the trauma of seeing the promise that was my mother and father broken and lost forever.

But children adore their parents more profoundly than anyone can imagine. I know I did mine. I loved them so much that I allowed them to possess me –– to inhabit me like demons. But, of course, they didn't possess me. I possessed myself of them in order to hang onto them.

And when there is a conflict between parents, a child feels compelled to choose. He never chooses himself. I never did. The conflict between my mother and father went on inside of me for years –– with me alternately choosing him then her then him again. But never me.

Perhaps I'm standing bare-chested in front of the bathroom basin exploring my face in the mirror –– exploring my life in the mirror. It's my father's face I see staring back at me. Or I take a drag from a cigarette and a swig from my vodka rocks and burst out laughing at the joke the guy down the bar just told. It's my mother's laugh I hear. But do I have a face, a life, a laugh of my own apart from them?

It comes to us all. It came to me that day standing by my father's grave –– the time to exorcise the demons within. Already I was feeling a sweet, longing grief for those very real people inside of me, but it was time to say good-bye.

The End