The beauty we miss
On slowing down: a lesson from times past (and passed)
Near as regular as the cycle of the sun itself, my mother falls asleep each night on her left shoulder, facing the television, with her glasses on.
Tanner, our hairy and beloved pup, the cutest of cuties, lays on the bed, kitty-corner from my mother, turned away from the television towards the windows, also on his left shoulder.
And each night, sometime between the hours of 8:30 and 10 pm, I walk into my mother’s (and Tanner’s) room, turn off her television, take off her glasses, and wish her and the dog a good night. “Love you, see you in the morning,” I say.
After losing my father (it’ll be three months next weekend) so suddenly, I now see what I once overlooked, what a book like Love You Forever manages to capture: just how precious these moments are.
In any given period, it’s easy to forget the fact that whatever you’re enduring will not last forever . . . Indeed, that it may last hardly more than a few weeks or months (especially when you’re young)! We come to set our eyes on the horizon—particularly in times of idleness and redundancy—desperate, often for no apparent reason at all, to escape what is to us so bleak a reality.
Sometimes, too, it is simply the case that (as with any habit) we become so accustomed to whatever routine we’re in that our minds become less aware of, less awake to, the many minutiae throughout our day.
Without conscious effort, you see, we tend to take for granted these most beautiful and fundamental blessings.
When we’re young, we dream about what life will be like when we’re older. Having never lost—having never been acquainted with finitude—we’re bound, from the start, to overlook our blessings, often desperate to break free from the bounds of childhood.
But then there comes a time when we think, hey, you know, it wasn’t all that bad, right? In fact, as they always wagered I would, I realize that my parents did a pretty good job, and everything kind of makes sense now!
But I was such a piece of shit! How could I have been so ungrateful? And how did I overlook the beauty of those times? Why do I see it only now?
Why did I have to lose my father to realize how much I appreciated him? . . . Why couldn’t I have told him while he was still here?
I think my father always knew, no matter how frustrated we were, that we loved him.
The world is not always so kind a place.
It is a tragedy, indeed, that we may only know how much we love something once our lives are devoid of it. In fact, this is the great tragedy of being a family member—and, in particular, from what I’ve gathered, a parent.
Because we hardly ever admit to the ones we love most just how much we love them, for doing so would necessitate we acknowledge their finitude.
As articulated by
in his post Why Connection Makes Life Worth Living, “Permitting ourselves to love anything requires the simultaneous acceptance of the anxiety surrounding its loss.”I wrote about this earlier in a journal entry about saying goodbye to my college roommates:
Now, admittedly, though I love them, you’d never catch me hugging the bros for more than a second or two—even if it was their dying wish—because, well, it’d be a little fruity. But that’s beside the point.
The point is that only when, for the first time, life inevitably rips from our hands that which we thought was ours forever do we open ourselves to the reality that nothing else is ours either.
Only through loss are we able to love. Only through absence may we appreciate.
Such is the nature of growing up . . . And herein lies the pain of every coming-of-age story.
If you’d like access to the paid version of Ryan’s Newsletter for free, you can refer other readers.
I recall, on the plane ride home to convene with my mother and my brother following my father’s death, a feeling I’d never felt before: the desire to have children.
Now, knock on wood, cus I ain’t ready yet. But it was strange, you know, because I never realized until death forced me to just how much I loved my father and just how much I, as a result, wanted to be a father.
Only in what was the most extreme of circumstances did it become clear to me what mattered most.
Perhaps it is for this reason, in what’s become so unserious a world, that people’s priorities seem so discombobulated.
Tanner is about 10 years old right now. I hate to say it, but the reality is that dogs tend to max out at about 15 or 16 years (sorry, buddy). Sure, he could live till he’s 20 (and I’m gonna do my best to make sure he gets there), but in all likelihood, I’ve got only a short amount of time left with that good ol’ boy.
Not to mention—and far more pertinently—I, in all likelihood, will be God knows where for many months of the year throughout the foreseeable future.
As of today, I’ll be home for another six weeks or so. At the beginning of January, I’m heading east for a ski trip with some friends and then returning to Charleston for a couple of weeks.
Near the end of January, I’m flying home to embark on another ski trip, this time out west and with my family. And then I’ll return again to Charleston for I don’t know how long, from which I’ll probably be back and forth intermittently for most of the spring.
I don’t know what I’m doing in the summer, and I’m itching to work at a ski resort next winter.
So, for all I know, there may not be too many more nights of me going into my mother’s (and Tanner’s) room to say goodnight and turn the TV off.
Life may feel slow right now, but I ought to soak it up because there will be a time I reminisce upon these moments.
Losing a loved one is no joke . . . A true world-rocker that grabs you tightly by your spine and shakes you until you have no choice but to let go.
Let go of what?
Of any sort of control you mistakenly thought you had. And, better yet, of any worldly cares that do not matter.
What’s crazy about all of this is that I’ve hardly come close to suffering. In fact, I got just close enough to realize, truly and deeply, just how bad life can be . . . And just how lucky I am.
Death, surgery, and everything in between . . . The nature of my recent experiences—of the way my father went—is, in many ways, a blessing. It all could have been a hell of a lot more painful.
Still, I feel humbled, reduced, purged.
I notice a slow-burning pain within, especially in these past few days (it comes and it goes), that bears down upon me in a manner that proves more than ever before just how helpless a human, no matter how “strong” he thinks he is, can be . . . How vulnerable we are to circumstances outside of our control.
Though I try almost every day to avoid this pain, I cannot.
The “letting go” I speak of, I suppose, is in part my acceptance of this pain, my willingness to be overtaken by it so it may do its duty and run its course so that I may eventually move forward—though forever different.
I’m always reluctant to accept pain. I always fight back. I don’t like to have to slow down.
I must be running from something.
I knew not, when I had just turned 20 (I must have been in Charleston at the time), that I’d only have five years left with my dad. Or, when I had just turned 15 after my first high school soccer season, that my father only had a decade left. Or, when I had just turned 10 (my intro to double digits), that I had already spent more than half the amount of time I’d ever spend with my dad.
I sometimes think about life like this . . . You know, in the sad, nostalgic sort of way . . . In the way which casts a light on the inherently innocent beauty of any given situation . . . Of the knowledge that any moment is damned to become but a fleeting memory.
Just as I’m sitting here, writing this journal alone in my childhood bed at 25 years of age while it pours rain on this unseasonably warm November night, my father and I once went fishing together—quite often, actually—unaware the both of us, of just how special, just how unique and fleeting those moments were in our cumulative human experience.
For I’d soon become a snobby teenager who wanted to do nothing more than kick soccer balls, hang out with friends, and try to get a girlfriend.
How could I have known it would all pass? How could I have known I’d one day be sitting here like this?
Having been home to recover from heart surgery for the past month, I often feel like I’m walking through a series of memories. Every piece of paper, every stuffed animal, every picture. It all stirs me. You know?
It’s that “well, here we are!” feeling.
25 is one of those ages you ponder when you’re a kid. You think, “By then, I’ll have it made.” It’s for this very reason that they say youth is wasted on the young.
We take these things, these very special things, for granted, rushing through them in a desperate attempt to get somewhere that’s almost always nowhere.
And then, one day, we wake up, and we’re 25, and we realize: childhood is over.
Here I am!
All grown up.
Exactly where I always wanted to be, yet reminiscing on times past and passed . . .
Times that will never again be.
Forever and always.
If you want to support my work but aren’t ready to subscribe, you can leave a tip with Buy Me A Coffee.