whenever i drive my car around a bend, i always look ahead of the curve, beyond where my eyes would normally fall, keeping my focus soft and slightly ahead. maybe everybody does this. i don’t know. but i know where i learned to do this. i learned it from riding horses at a time when the sum total of my years was still in single digits.

when you’re riding a jumping course, you always want to keep your eyes well ahead of you, looking around the corner to your next fence, aware of everything that exists between where you are and where you’re going. you want to maintain a soft gaze but a strong focus, and you want to keep your horse under you, steady, responsive to your confidence and to the foresight of your intention. this is an experience i have known in my body since i was a child, and it informs even the simplest of tasks i complete as an adult. it’s now second nature to me, but i’ve never told anyone about this before. if i hadn’t just described it, no one ever would have known this about me.

my life is filled with experiences like this one—simple moments in time, acquired over a life, reinforced with positive or negative responses and integrated concentrically, like a giant smoothie into which ingredients continue to be added and blended—the sum total of which comprise . . . well . . . me.

but what happens to all of these experiences, these moments subsumed and cohered and attracted to a life like flyers stapled to a telephone pole in layers upon layers, some tattered and torn, and some completely intact underneath volumes of weathered outliers? what happens to our story, with all its footnotes and appendices and references and subtexts, when the final words are written and the binding is closed?

my father is eighty-one now. he was born before the second world war. he had a brother who died as a baby from a virus that antibiotics would cure when they were invented just a few years thereafter. his father woke up at three o’clock every morning to deliver milk to people’s houses directly from a dairy farm. my father has a scar on his chin that he got when he was five or six, from when his twin brother pushed him down a steep hill on a bicycle that was too big for him. he went to pharmacy school and then put himself through law school at night while working as a pharmacist during the day.

my father was a coxswain and lived in his rowing crew’s boat house on the schuylkill river in his early thirties. he met and married my mother and had six children with her before they divorced eighteen years later. he coached olympic crew and dedicated much of his life to perfecting his own coaching style. he remarried when he was sixty. he practiced patent law well into his seventies.

my father has suffered from a degenerative form of dementia for the past three years (and likely even longer). once the epitome of piss-and-vinegar vigor, he barely responds to events around him. once the commander of an epic vocabulary and stellar penmanship, he no longer has words on most days. once creative and artistic, he can no longer feed himself. but i know he is still alive in his body and that his mind is still working. i know he still knows everything he learned in his lifetime even if he can’t summon any of it to the outside world. i know he has stories he’s never told anyone. i know all of his life’s work, the sum total of all of his experiences, is concentrated within his deteriorating corporeal being. what i don’t know is what will become of that lifetime’s worth of experience when he leaves his body for good.

what is the purpose of this lifetime we are given if not to collect the riches of experience and exposure to the world we digest with our senses? what will become of each lifetime’s most valuable of collections? unlike the materials we amass which we can leave to those who still partake of this world after we have departed from it, where do our experiences go? what happens to the experiences we have acquired but haven’t shared?

what is a life’s legacy beyond others’ remembrances of it?

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i began writing this piece four months ago, when my father was still eighty-one, when my father was still alive. he died two weeks ago, two days after his eighty-second birthday which, because of the a calendar anomaly, fell on the day after thanksgiving this year.

i hadn’t been to see him in a while. i think i was putting it off in a quiet but desperate thrash of denial. i think i hoped if i waited, it would be okay somehow. but i knew otherwise, that something was changing. when i woke up on thanksgiving morning, i felt a sense of urgency, and i resolved then to fly up to see him so i could be with him on his birthday.

there had been many signs that his time here was quickly coming to a close. he had lost his ability to eat solid food as swallowing was becoming increasingly difficult for him. he slept for most of his days, but even when he was not sleeping, he did not have the energy to keep his eyes open. he was winding down, i told people. i knew it was the right thing to say, but i didn’t know what it looked like, to wind down a life.

my visit with him was quiet but full. i spent three days sitting with him, holding his hand, sometimes talking to him and sometimes sharing silence with him. i knew he was still somewhere in his body, but i sensed that he was separating from this place. his access to the surface, where his consciousness could meet with my own, was increasingly infrequent and difficult for him. he was living in his own depths, taking leave bit by bit of this time and space. sometimes when i spoke to him, he would respond to me with a squeeze of my hand or a nod, but most of the time my words met with silence. i asked him if he was afraid. i asked him if he could forgive me for all the times in my life when i failed him, when i betrayed his love with my own petulance and selfishness, when i treated him unkindly. but he didn’t answer. and so i was left to hope that he had heard me and that he knew how much i loved him and how sorry i was. for all the not-enoughs and the too-lates. for everything. when i left him on the final day of my visit, i knew i would never see him again.

he died five days later.

and here i remain, posing the same questions i posed when he was still alive, but in a different way. i know he is no longer in his body, but where has he gone? what has become of all that he learned from his own inquiries and the host of experiences he amassed during his lifetime? where are his feelings and his hopes and his joys and his dreams now that his body has expired? i pose these questions into the gaping abyss of unanswerables. i hear them resound and echo, and i know better than to await a response.

if only i could have gathered these questions up and wrapped them up neatly, like the violets he used to pick from our back yard to make into springtime bouquets for us. if only he could have given the answers to me for safekeeping. i would have protected them and kept them warm. i would have held them in my heart. and they could have shown my own hopes and dreams what it looked like to be free.

Published December 25, 2013