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Monday, December 10, 2007
Looking for LoveToday marks the twentieth anniversary of my father's passing. He was forty-three when he died of a heart
attack, and I was fifteen. At the time it was devastating, more in the changes to my physical experience than my mental one.
While I was never truly close to my father I did love him and missed him greatly. In the short term we suffered financially
and my mother worked extremely hard to make us think nothing had changed. While we knew it had we all shared in this mutual
illusion because we wanted it to be true. While the man was gone we didn't want the home he helped create to go with him.
Mom worked and the kids went to school and we kept things as close to the same as possible.
All these years I did not
think that my father's death had affected me mentally or emotionally. I felt that I had moved from being a teenager with
a father to one without, smoothly and intact. However as I grow older I realize that the smallest ripple can have tremendous
impact in any number of unknown ways, in unknown areas. What is not faced does not disappear. It lingers on, at the edge of
the psyche, and whispers its persistent presence.
Unconsciously I started a search to fill the role of my father. All
older men who entered my life were candidates for the position. They attempted to do a job that I did not realize that I was
filling and they did not realize they were working.
It was unfair to all involved because it was a relationship that
was doomed to fail from the start. They could not live up to my expectations and they would always, inevitably, disappoint
my unfounded fealty.
We have all heard the phrase, "Looking for love in all the wrong places," and we invariably
associate this with romantic love. However, it can and does apply to any relationship. My father died twenty years ago and
it is only now that I am truly feeling his loss. I honor his life by stopping my futile search. I had a father. I do not need
to try and find an echo to experience a father's love. My father loved me and that is enough. I will remember him as best
I can. As I face myself and recognize my own wholeness, the need to look outside of myself for love diminishes. It took
twenty years but I am finally beginning to feel my father's true love emanating from within, as the exhaustive external
search finally comes to its inevitable end.
8:39 pm est
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