I remember an interview that Derrida gave (I think it was in the film, Ghost-Dance), where Derrida was asked whether or not he believed in ghosts. And, naturally, in his very "Derrida" sort of way, he wrestled with the question along multiple axes, (subjectivity, cinema, etc.) and ultimately said yes. This is not surprising given his project of the deconstruction of "presence" and his many, many texts and comments on concepts such as "the trace" and "cinders" and ultimately, "specters."
Yesterday, January 21, 2023, marks the second anniversary of the death of my father. For reasons I can't quite comprehend, losing my father has been infinitely more impactful than losing my mother. "Impactful" is likely not the appropriate term, because the night I learned that my mother had died, I fell to the floor and let out a cry the likes of which I've never heard from a human being before or since. "Enduring" is probably the better term. The death of my mother hit me hard, but the brunt of the impact had diminished a great deal within six months or so. By that time, the dreams of my mother, once so frequent, had lessened to a few times a month. ...
Yesterday, January 21, 2023, marks the second anniversary of the death of my father. For reasons I can't quite comprehend, losing my father has been infinitely more impactful than losing my mother. "Impactful" is likely not the appropriate term, because the night I learned that my mother had died, I fell to the floor and let out a cry the likes of which I've never heard from a human being before or since. "Enduring" is probably the better term. The death of my mother hit me hard, but the brunt of the impact had diminished a great deal within six months or so. By that time, the dreams of my mother, once so frequent, had lessened to a few times a month. ...
With my father, however, while the impact was less severe, the duration of it has far exceeded what I would have expected. I would have expected it to have diminished fairly quickly, perhaps even more quickly than it did with my mother. After all, this was my second loss of a parent. But more importantly, my parents split when I was a baby, right around my first birthday, in fact. By the time I was old enough to begin forming lasting memories, both my parents were married to other people, and my father had already started on his other family. I didn't grow up with my father. His visitation schedule was limited to every other weekend, and because he lived in a tiny town about 45 minutes from my mother's home, there were no weeknight visits or sleepovers. I literally saw my dad every other weekend, besides when he would swing by my house on the off-Fridays to pay his child support, (which my father paid faithfully every week).
By the time I was five years old, I had two younger brothers in my dad's home, brothers whom I loved very much but who, in a sense, were my "other" family. Visiting him was terribly rough for me. It was always abundantly clear that I was a visitor, that there was an entire family dynamic that operated in full for the 26 days of the month that I wasn't there, that I was an encroacher, an intruder into this world. The toys that I would get for Christmas, which I was required to leave at my dad's house "so that I'd have things to play with while I was there," would be broken, misplaced, left outside... in short, gone... by the next time I'd go to visit. On two occasions when I was growing up, (age 10 and age 12) I was the only person at the extended family Christmas Eve gathering who didn't have any Christmas presents to open. (Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins... everyone but me). Moreover, when I was about four, my father had a monumentally impactful religious conversion experience, after which our entertainment options in the house were severely limited. At my mom's I listened to hard rock music and watched violent television (yes, even as a young kid). At my dad's, we were only allowed to listen to gospel music, and we weren't allowed to watch movies or television with any swear words. We were forbidden to watch the Saturday morning cartoon, "Alvin and the Chipmunks," along with "Mighty Mouse." I had to dress completely differently when I went to my dad's. I remember being told that "Jesus doesn't like little boys with long hair" when I grew out a rat tail (back when those were a thing). I remember having to change my t-shirt around age 7 or 8 because it had a skull on it, as we were going to see my grandpa, and my dad didn't want my grandpa to see me in a skull t-shirt. Eventually, my mom refused to send clothes with me to my dad's house. And to a kid whose entire world was music, feeling like an outsider in this world without my music was truly excruciating. And being forced to spend every other weekend there, where I had no friends, no music, no television, draconian rules, and felt constant shame, felt like punishment. As I grew into adulthood, my father drifted further to the right, and I further to the left.
The thing about my dad, though, was this: if I voiced a need, my dad would come through. He might be late, very late, even. But he would come through. When I was a young adult (and still lived under the delusion that all men should work on their vehicles themselves - a delusion I inherited from my dad), if I had car issues, I'd call him, and he'd be over within a day to help me fix it. On a few occasions when I was particularly strapped for cash in grad school (and once after grad school), he would give me a chunk of cash - a thousand here, five hundred there - without questions, without even the slightest hint of judgment or criticism. Every single time I've ever moved as an adult (and given our travels through graduate school and beyond, I've moved a lot), my dad has helped. Without question or reservation. I didn't even have to ask. The second I told him I was moving, he'd ask me when, citing that he needed to ask for the time off.
Needless to say, my relationship with my father was incomprehensibly complicated, (as most are, I guess).
My father died from complications arising from COVID in 2021. His illness and death were extremely abrupt. Basically, within two weeks' time, he was sick, then gone. Since my father's passing, I've been visited by him at least three times a week in my dreams. Sometimes more, but never less. Basically, almost every time I remember my dreams, my dad is in them. I've spent more than a little time pondering why it is that the loss of this man, whose presence in my life was so minimal compared to that of my mother, has had such an intense and persistent endurance. I've wondered if it's precisely because he was my last parent, especially given that he was so healthy, and that his father (and most of his brothers) lived well into their eighties. His death was the moment I became an orphan in the world. I've also wondered if it's not the case that my father became, for me, something of a metaphor, for all the absent father figures I would encounter through the rest of my life - all the step-fathers (five, by the time my mother died), all the boyfriends, many of whom were abusive, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. And while it's true that I could call my father as an adult and he would be there to help, at the same time, it's also true that I was the visitor in his house the entire time I was growing up, with no space of my own. I remember the time that my dad got a license plate for the family van, and personalized it to include the first-name initials of his wife and all his children, except for me; and the time that he showed a photo of my younger brother to a group of people, me standing right next to him, and referred to my younger brother as "my oldest son."
There was so much that I wanted to say to my dad. I think that I thought I had another twenty or so years with him, and that maybe, when we were both old men, I could sit down with him and say them. But I never got that chance. Then, given the timing of his death (at the height of the virus, prior to any vaccinations), and my own respiratory conditions, I didn't physically go to his funeral, either. Moreover, as he was cremated, not buried, there is no physical "site" where I can go and sit "with" him. In my dreams of him, I'm having to say goodbye, over and over. Sometimes, it's because he's suffering from a terminal illness, and others, it's that he's getting ready to leave for an indefinite journey. But in almost every dream, I'm struggling to say goodbye. This week, almost serendipitously, I reread this magnificent line in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: "Is it not true that the only dead who return are those whom one has buried too quickly and too deeply, without paying them the necessary respects, and that remorse testifies less to an excess of memory than to a powerlessness or to a failure in the working through of memory?" I suspect this is the reason for my father's persistent nighttime visits. I'm still struggling to say goodbye.
By the time I was five years old, I had two younger brothers in my dad's home, brothers whom I loved very much but who, in a sense, were my "other" family. Visiting him was terribly rough for me. It was always abundantly clear that I was a visitor, that there was an entire family dynamic that operated in full for the 26 days of the month that I wasn't there, that I was an encroacher, an intruder into this world. The toys that I would get for Christmas, which I was required to leave at my dad's house "so that I'd have things to play with while I was there," would be broken, misplaced, left outside... in short, gone... by the next time I'd go to visit. On two occasions when I was growing up, (age 10 and age 12) I was the only person at the extended family Christmas Eve gathering who didn't have any Christmas presents to open. (Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins... everyone but me). Moreover, when I was about four, my father had a monumentally impactful religious conversion experience, after which our entertainment options in the house were severely limited. At my mom's I listened to hard rock music and watched violent television (yes, even as a young kid). At my dad's, we were only allowed to listen to gospel music, and we weren't allowed to watch movies or television with any swear words. We were forbidden to watch the Saturday morning cartoon, "Alvin and the Chipmunks," along with "Mighty Mouse." I had to dress completely differently when I went to my dad's. I remember being told that "Jesus doesn't like little boys with long hair" when I grew out a rat tail (back when those were a thing). I remember having to change my t-shirt around age 7 or 8 because it had a skull on it, as we were going to see my grandpa, and my dad didn't want my grandpa to see me in a skull t-shirt. Eventually, my mom refused to send clothes with me to my dad's house. And to a kid whose entire world was music, feeling like an outsider in this world without my music was truly excruciating. And being forced to spend every other weekend there, where I had no friends, no music, no television, draconian rules, and felt constant shame, felt like punishment. As I grew into adulthood, my father drifted further to the right, and I further to the left.
The thing about my dad, though, was this: if I voiced a need, my dad would come through. He might be late, very late, even. But he would come through. When I was a young adult (and still lived under the delusion that all men should work on their vehicles themselves - a delusion I inherited from my dad), if I had car issues, I'd call him, and he'd be over within a day to help me fix it. On a few occasions when I was particularly strapped for cash in grad school (and once after grad school), he would give me a chunk of cash - a thousand here, five hundred there - without questions, without even the slightest hint of judgment or criticism. Every single time I've ever moved as an adult (and given our travels through graduate school and beyond, I've moved a lot), my dad has helped. Without question or reservation. I didn't even have to ask. The second I told him I was moving, he'd ask me when, citing that he needed to ask for the time off.
Needless to say, my relationship with my father was incomprehensibly complicated, (as most are, I guess).
My father died from complications arising from COVID in 2021. His illness and death were extremely abrupt. Basically, within two weeks' time, he was sick, then gone. Since my father's passing, I've been visited by him at least three times a week in my dreams. Sometimes more, but never less. Basically, almost every time I remember my dreams, my dad is in them. I've spent more than a little time pondering why it is that the loss of this man, whose presence in my life was so minimal compared to that of my mother, has had such an intense and persistent endurance. I've wondered if it's precisely because he was my last parent, especially given that he was so healthy, and that his father (and most of his brothers) lived well into their eighties. His death was the moment I became an orphan in the world. I've also wondered if it's not the case that my father became, for me, something of a metaphor, for all the absent father figures I would encounter through the rest of my life - all the step-fathers (five, by the time my mother died), all the boyfriends, many of whom were abusive, sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. And while it's true that I could call my father as an adult and he would be there to help, at the same time, it's also true that I was the visitor in his house the entire time I was growing up, with no space of my own. I remember the time that my dad got a license plate for the family van, and personalized it to include the first-name initials of his wife and all his children, except for me; and the time that he showed a photo of my younger brother to a group of people, me standing right next to him, and referred to my younger brother as "my oldest son."
There was so much that I wanted to say to my dad. I think that I thought I had another twenty or so years with him, and that maybe, when we were both old men, I could sit down with him and say them. But I never got that chance. Then, given the timing of his death (at the height of the virus, prior to any vaccinations), and my own respiratory conditions, I didn't physically go to his funeral, either. Moreover, as he was cremated, not buried, there is no physical "site" where I can go and sit "with" him. In my dreams of him, I'm having to say goodbye, over and over. Sometimes, it's because he's suffering from a terminal illness, and others, it's that he's getting ready to leave for an indefinite journey. But in almost every dream, I'm struggling to say goodbye. This week, almost serendipitously, I reread this magnificent line in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: "Is it not true that the only dead who return are those whom one has buried too quickly and too deeply, without paying them the necessary respects, and that remorse testifies less to an excess of memory than to a powerlessness or to a failure in the working through of memory?" I suspect this is the reason for my father's persistent nighttime visits. I'm still struggling to say goodbye.
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