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Traces of Kid

‘The leaves of memory seemed to make

A mournful rustling in the dark.’

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Fire of Drift-wood

         Around the corner from his apartment is a small park where Tommy and Livy used to play. Here was the sandbox where she used to dig holes and fill them with water from the nearby faucet to float little boats. There was the swing set where he used to push her as she screamed “Higher, Daddy, higher!” In the far corner was the spot where they lit sparklers and pinwheels in the summertime. The second to last time Tommy saw her, she had accidentally burned her little finger on one of the spent sparklers when she tried to pick it up, thinking it had already cooled down. Tommy recalled that he had made the same mistake as Livy when he was her age. Funny. Tommy ran her finger under the cool water from the park faucet and wiped away her little tears, holding her close to him as she rested her head against his chest while he carried her home. “I got you, Livy,” he told her. “I got you, don’t cry.”

         Next to the park there is a small house with a portico in front in which the sakura somehow always managed to accumulate in piles in the springtime after they fell from a nearby cherry tree. Once on the way home from somewhere, Livy stopped at that house and scooped up armfuls of the sakura petals and tossed them into the air like she was celebrating something, and the sakura then were not petals at all, but instead confetti falling all about her as she giggled with glee. Tommy had his camera with him and managed to get a few shots of her doing that, those now being some of his favorite pictures of her. She was wearing that little pink turtleneck at the time that made its way into any number of his photographs of her for some reason.

         On the way home from the park is the house where Livy’s little kindergarten friend Kenta used to live. Kenta, like Livy, had a Japanese mother and, strangely, a father also from New Jersey like Tommy. Funny how 6,000 miles from home a family just like his should happen to settle 100 yards from his front door. Kenta and his parents eventually moved back to Jersey, but not before Livy and Tommy ran into Kenta and his mother again one Saturday while Livy was visiting him post-separation. It was to be the last time Livy and her little friend were to see each other.

         Along the major thoroughfare near his apartment, the Yamate Dori, is the bus stop where Livy used to wait in the morning to catch the Anpanman Bus to school. The school bus was vividly painted with Anpanman, a favorite anime character in Japan, along with Anpanman’s other cartoon friends. Tommy still saw it pass by once in a while with a new crop of little kindergarteners inside. In the mornings, the kids would all meet at the bus stop and run around playing while waiting for the bus to take them to school. Tommy remembered that there was a little dog that lived in the neighborhood with whom all the kids liked to play. She was a friendly little mutt who, Tommy imagined, thought was one of the kids.

         Everywhere he looked, every time he turned around, Tommy found traces of Livy about him. In the house, of course, she was simply everywhere. He could still see her in the o-furo room where she took her first bath, and where they used to catch magnetic fish with the toy rod and reel he had bought for her. He saw her in the living room where she took her first steps, and where they watched cartoons together. He could see her in the tatami room where she said her first words, and where he read storybooks to her. Here was the sofa where he fed her from bottles when she was an infant. There was the toy chest that still held what used to be her favorite toys – the Brio train set, the Barbie dolls, the Tickle Me Elmo, the princess outfits. All still there. All still there.

        And while she was now gone, like her once favorite toys, he too was still here. While his darling little girl, his adorable angel, was gone from this place, he too was still there. And as he remembered, whenever he saw her there in his mind in these places where she had once been but now was no more, as he drifted away into those times gone by, as ever the rain would fall.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

            Having lost all attempts at “amicable negations” with his ex-wife and after having been denied his parental rights by the Japanese “legal system,” Tommy joined what was to become known as the Left-Behind Parent Movement. In the early years following the final divorce decree by the Japanese courts, Tommy had lost himself in wandering throughout other parts of Asia, staying away from Japan for as long as his school holidays and financial resources would allow. During this period of time, he had developed an unhealthy hatred for the country that had taken from him the most precious thing in the world — his only child. Escaping to the Temples of Angkor, the tranquil beaches of Koh Samui on the Gulf of Siam, and the wilds of the Himalayas in the Khumbu Region in Nepal afforded him some measure of relief from the agony of his loss, albeit a relief that evaporated upon his return to the island he had once loved, but which now he viewed as heartless and devoid of all human compassion. To him at these times, all Japanese people were complicit in the injustice he was experiencing through their indifference and sham pretense of fancying themselves as a “harmonious country” driven by a general disposition toward courtesy and “omotenashi,” or “hospitality” for outsiders. Were it not for a determination to be available for his daughter by staying close, Tommy might well have boarded a plane back to the States never to return. He considered himself a broken man, held together somehow only by a grim resolve to bring about some vague sense of “closure” to the whole unfortunate affair. He was one part bitterness, one part anger, and one part despair, and he honestly didn’t know how he was going to get through this traumatic amputation of his erstwhile parent-child relationship.

            After several years of trying to readjust to a life as an un-parent, Tommy learned of a case of another left-behind parent, one Christian Sorensen, who had found himself in the custody of the local constabulary after attempting to “re-kidnap” his children from his ex-wife who had violated a court-sanctioned divorce agreement in Georgia that had awarded main custody of the kids to Christian with generous visitation rights and alimony to his former spouse. Sorensen became something of a cause célèbre, with left-behind parents around Japan rallying to the cry of “Free Christian Sorensen!” Tommy started thinking that maybe he should get involved in the burgeoning movement after first avoiding it some years earlier in its nascent stage as he had just needed some time to deal with his PTSD. He had, in fact, been brushed off by U.S. government officials in the past who insisted that they “could not get involved in domestic matters in Japan,” and to “consult with a Japanese attorney.” Thus, Tommy had met with one roadblock after another in trying to get somebody — anybody — to take an interest in his cause. And so, despite the promise of reliving the pain the loss of Livy had engendered, Tommy dove headlong into the abyss.

            Tommy got involved in any number of aspects of the movement, including meetings with other “LBPs,” protest marches through the streets of Shibuya, letters to his Congressman, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and other government officials, and most importantly, he thought, meetings at the U.S. Embassy to get them to put pressure on Japan to do something about the injustices endemic in their system of “justice” when it came to parental and children’s rights. Calls for kyōdō shinken (parental rights) were coupled with those of coercing Japan to accede to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

            There were actually two groups of left-behind parents in the movement — parents whose Japanese spouses literally abducted the couples’ children from foreign countries back to Japan and resident parents like himself who were victims of the institutional “abductions” brought about through Japan’s single custody system upon divorce. The idea was that by bringing these two different groups together changes in Japanese law might be brought about through “gai-atsu,” or outside pressure.

           The U.S. Embassy officials at this point were actually extremely supportive of the efforts of parents such as himself, perhaps due to increased awareness of the issue and concerted action by parents, and in fact persuaded embassies from other countries to join together to issue a series of joint demarches, which were coordinated efforts among the various nations asserting a shared position of concern and request for action. Tommy attended a dozen meetings at the embassy to share his story and to continue to pressure his government and that of Japan to bring about justice for left-behind parents.

           Ultimately, the embassy was successful in persuading Japan to sign on to the Hague Convention, and after some 40 years since it was first adopted, Japan finally signed on to the international treaty. Emboldened by this success, Tommy felt some measure of hope that the victory on that front would translate into changes in the Japanese legal system itself for resident parents following divorce, not only for foreign parents, but also for Japanese parents who had been similarly separated from their kids. The reality, though, was that that was not to happen, and Tommy’s efforts to help non-resident parents to be reunited with their children did not make any difference at all in the Japanese family courts. Twenty years later, Japanese politicians were still giving lip service to the issue, insisting that they were “looking into and discussing the matter,” which when translated into explicit English from the implicit Japanese meant they were weren’t going to do anything at all.

           Moreover, there were deep divisions in the Left-behind Parent Movement due to different views on how to bring about resolutions to their situations, with some being more conciliatory and others more radical in their approaches. This was, after all, not an association born simply of shared interests, but instead one which attempted to unite deeply scarred and emotionally distraught people. Internecine warfare often broke out among the parents, and at times their anger at Japan was directed at one another. Tommy was not exempt from this misdirected anger and took sides as well, unleashing his own fury at parents he felt were trying to co-opt the movement for their own personal advantage, sometimes even for monetary gain. The hoped-for unity Tommy believed would bring about change was thus illusory, and the movement disintegrated over time.

           Even Japan’s acquiescence to the Hague Convention, Tommy eventually was to learn, was a sham, with Japanese courts refusing to return children abducted from foreign countries by their Japanese mothers and fathers with claims of potential “domestic violence” on the part of gaijin spouses and assertions that it “would be wrong to return abducted children” back to the lands of their birth as it would be “traumatic for them after having become accustomed to life in Japan.” Or some other such nonsense.

           To say that Tommy had become disillusioned anew was an understatement, and the ensuing realization that he had once again ran headlong into a dead end was almost too much for him to bear. He had spent several years “fighting the good fight” to no avail, and he now understood that the energy he had invested into the cause was nothing more than a distraction from and avoidance of his true feelings of sorrow over the loss. He no longer believed that concerted action and sheer determination had any chance against an intransigent Japan, and slowly he drifted away from the Left-behind Parent Movement. By this time, he and Livy had been separated from each other for some eight years, and the little girl he once walked to her kindergarten bus stop was now in high school. He shook his head the way a man in a drunken stupor tries to overcome his inebriated state. Reality wasn’t just knocking at his door — it was crashing through it like a battering ram. And there was no getting out of its way.

I see the bad moon a-rising,
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.

Don’t go around tonight,
Well it’s bound to take your life.
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

– Bad Moon Rising, Credence Clearwater Revival

            How could he have been so stupid? How could he not have seen sooner the disaster that was to unfold? Were the signs all there that he somehow didn’t see, or was the inevitable result of this incompatible marriage impossible to predict?

            Once again, Tommy felt the lash of self-recriminations upon his back, the familiar self-flagellations to which he had now become accustomed. The sting he felt now was well-deserved, he thought. He felt like a fool for not seeing what was to come, although at times he felt that such prescience was illogical, that the ability to look into the heart of a woman determined to hide the truth of who she was and to discern her true nature was an unrealistic expectation. She had been a perfectly acceptable girlfriend, and they had been together for four years before the Clearblue test necessitated that mad rush to the altar. “Accidents” of this sort were, it seemed, a family tradition for the DeVito family, after all, so maybe it was his destiny to start married life this way after nearly 40 years as a confirmed bachelor. His parents and his sister all found themselves suddenly in a “family way,” and he guessed now it was his turn, that fate had determined that his single life was somehow untenable in the grander scheme of things.

            Abortion was never a consideration for Tommy, although in retrospect he felt, with no small pangs of guilt, that it might have been worthy of consideration given the way things turned out. The loss both he and his daughter Livy lived through would not have occurred had the pregnancy not have proceeded. It wasn’t really a matter of religious objection, however, despite his upbringing as a Roman Catholic. His then girlfriend, in fact, didn’t seem at all averse to the idea, as indicated by her questioning “What should we do?” after the results of her condition had been confirmed. As a confirmed “woke” liberal from New Jersey, Tommy had always supported a woman’s right to choose, and had Yuko expressed a strong desire to take that path he might have acquiesced, albeit reluctantly. But when he perceived her indecision on the matter, all that remained was this feeling that ending the life that he had created was just something that, for whatever reason, he could not seriously contemplate. This was his child in there, and while theoretically he could entertain this notion that life did not truly begin until the moment of birth, in his heart he didn’t really believe it. Thus, the decision was made, and marriage plans began apace at that moment. After just a few moments after becoming aware of his girlfriend’s gravidity, Tommy blurted out “Don’t worry, baby. Let’s just get married.” Ready or not!

            Something, though, had changed in their relationship. The fact was undeniable. The once-or-twice-a-week lovemaking that he and Yuko had become accustomed to as boyfriend and girlfriend very quickly morphed into what was to be, he thought anyhow, a lifelong commitment. The carefree days were over now — he was to become a father, a breadwinner, indeed, a family man. Yuko made that clear to him by unilaterally quitting her job as an “OL,” or “office lady,” just two months into her maternity. There was now a new apartment to find for his burgeoning family, and household furniture and baby clothes and cribs and strollers and BabyBjorns and any number of other purchases he was soon to make. Tommy watched with no small amount of apprehension as the money he had so carefully been putting away each month from his job as an itinerant English teacher began to rapidly dwindle, and the salary that had afforded him a very comfortable bachelor lifestyle suddenly seemed woefully inadequate given the exigencies of this unplanned change of life. And Tommy wasn’t at all sure that he could make things work. He was back in graduate school pursuing his master’s degree in education at night, which was another expense and another complication adding to his regular workload and his new responsibilities as a father. All of a sudden, like all new soon-to-be fathers, he imagined, it seemed to him that he was to bear the weight of whole world resting upon his shoulders.

            Even so, all of this would have been acceptable to him. Tommy was good with kids. “Uncle Tommy” had been favorite of his nieces and nephews, and they all loved his goofy ways and childlike demeanor when he was with them, ways that allowed him to see to world through their eyes. Maybe being a bachelor for four decades had resulted in him never really “growing up,” which was fine as far as Tommy was concerned. Adulthood was, after all, way overrated, and he liked being unencumbered with what he thought were the chains of parentage. It had permitted him the freedom to seamlessly make whatever changes in his life that the saw fit without the necessity of having to consult with another.

            Nevertheless, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon. Subtle changes in his girlfriend’s personality seemed to be taking place, or perhaps more accurately, were now revealing themselves. Tommy’s old Rastafari friend Greg Reddick from Redondo Beach during his college days at SC, a man he considered to be a wise and perceptive street philosopher, had told him once that people don’t really change, and that the changes you believe you are witnessing are really just manifestations of what always lay beneath. You just weren’t allowed to see them until the other decided to reveal those proclivities to you. And suddenly, indeed, this girl he had known for years, with whom he shared any number of happy times, was becoming unfamiliar to him in ways he could not clearly define, but which he knew were real, nonetheless. And he thought, as Oliver Hardy was wont to say to Stan Laurel, “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”

“Keep a fire burning in your eye

Pay attention to the open sky

You never know what will be coming down.

I don’t remember losing track of you

You were always dancing in and out of view

I must have thought you’d always be around.

Always keeping things real by playing the clown

Now you’re nowhere to be found”

– For a Dancer, Jackson Browne

It became clear to Tommy in time that Livy’s mother was determined to write him out of her life. With the full weight of the so-called “family court” behind her, Tommy became an un-parent, not just in a figurative sense, but in reality, under Japanese law. Upon conclusion of the divorce, Tommy was stripped of any and all parental rights. Livy was awarded to her mother in that no provision under Japanese law allowed for joint custody, or even enforceable visitation rights. He was no longer considered Livy’s father in the eyes of the law and had no more rights as a parent than the clerk at the convenience store on the corner had. And he knew that any attempt to force the issue by trying to see Livy would result in his arrest and possible imprisonment for “stalking.” Tommy wisely stayed away, unlike other left-behind parents that he knew who did try to see their kids and who wound up in detention and sometimes even deported for the crime of insisting that their natural rights as parents superseded Japan’s absurd and callous legal fictions.

The only way he could ever hope to see his daughter again, he knew, would be if Livy decided to get in touch with him again. So many factors obviated the possibility of Tommy making the first move, not just the legal peril he would find himself in should he do so, but, to Tommy, the dreaded eventuality of Livy reacting out the programming she’d been taught and rejecting him with a finality that would end any hope he had of a reunion. Tommy imagined what would happen if he approached her suddenly on the street, and in his heart, he knew that it would likely end up disastrously. He didn’t know exactly what Livy had been told over the years about her father, but one thing was certain — it was none of it good. Her mother was a master manipulator, and he assumed at this point that what Livy believed was precisely what her mother wanted her to believe.

And so, Tommy decided to remain in the old homestead, keeping a candle burning in the window to light the way for Livy’s hopeful, eventual return. If not a deep felt desire to see her father again, Tommy figured curiosity about her past — who she was and where she came from — would someday win out and bring her home. Tommy remembered reading somewhere that one of the hardest tasks of parenthood was patience, and that made sense to him. Acting in haste, out of some sense of urgency, he came to believe would sabotage whatever chance he had of seeing Livy again. It was at least an even chance that she would reject his entreaties out of hand, and only confirm the narrative Livy’s mother, grandparents, and “new father” had drilled into her mind. He’d had enough of being “the bad guy,” and just refused to play along. Being available to Livy by simply staying on the periphery of her life was the only weapon he had against the relentless onslaught of indoctrination to which Livy had been subject.

Thus, Tommy waited for her to come to him of her own volition. He knew instinctively that that was the only way this long sought after parent-child reunion had any hope of success. Reaching out to her, he felt, would achieve precisely the opposite of his intention, and so he stayed away. He could not, would not, risk the possibility of losing her forever, so as much as he wanted to approach her — something he knew would not be difficult to accomplish knowing what he did about her whereabouts and that of her mother and step-father — he weighed the potential pitfalls of such an action and decided the risks far outweighed any hoped-for rewards.

Tommy waited, then, at the place where he once taught Livy to read, where he played silly games with her, where he watched The Teletubbies and The Raptones and Tom and Jerry with her as he cradled her in his arms, and where he sang her to sleep at night. He was determined to remain in this place despite the pain it invariably caused him, and despite wanting to flee in an attempt to leave behind the phantoms of the past that visited him in every nook and corner of that place. He sometimes looked out the window, thinking that she might have even walked past the old homestead at some point just to revisit her origins, if ever so briefly. Yes, Tommy stayed and kept vigil, and the days passed into months, the months into years. And he kept the memories alive for the both of them.

On Acceptance

“God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971

Tommy struggled with the idea of acceptance. After all, what happened to him was, by defintion, unacceptable in every real sense. He had lost his daughter at the hands of a callous legal system that was ill-equipped to handle the copmplexity of divorce and the effect it had on children born of a marriage. He had learned through bitter experience that the Japanese sought to simplfy the complex, a kind of reductio ad absurdum that posited the notion that children are essentilly chattel in the eyes of the law, and that upon divorce, they belong exclsuively to one parent or another, invariably the Japanese parent in an international marriage and/or to the mother otherwise with whom they simplistically belived the child is always better off despite whatever failings that mother might exhibit. On top of this, Japanese “mental health specialists” hold with a belief that is contrary to all established psychological thought throughout the world, that belief being that upon divorce a child is better off severing all ties with one parent or another due to a ludicrous notion that it is better for the child not to have “divided loyalties.” Such was the impeneetrable wall he found himself flung against. And he knew that Livy suffered from these heartless ideas as much as he did.

But the notion of acceptance ran deeper than simply reconciling himself with the system that made him a non-parent in the eyes of the law. The problem with surrendering to the tide that sought to sweep him away was the fear that by accepting what had happened to him involved a surrender of hope — hope that one day he and Livy would one day be reunited. He feared losing that only connection he still had with his daughter — the one he himself maintained by “keeping the faith.” Despite the pitaflls of that hope, which the character Red in the film Shawshank Redemption described as a “dangerous thing” in that it “could drive a man insane,” it nevertheless served to establish in him a belief that one day the long sought after reunion would occur, despite the dual distances of time and place. Hope was the only link he still had with Livy, and Tommy often felt that losing that hope, by “moving on” with his life, would be a kind of death of his child that he was unwilling to accept. Accepting that she was gone forever from his life was simply too much to bear.

And so he persisted in holding to the ancient Latin adage of “dum spiro spero” — “while I breathe I hope.” Maybe if he really did let her go completely — if he accepted this untenable reality — he might in fact “move on” from the pain occasioned by his loss. Still, besides the horror of accepting such an idea, Tommy also felt that such acceptance amounted to a betrayal to his daughter, and indeed, to himself and to the love he once felt and still felt for Livy. He would not leave her behind as he had been left behind. He recalled the words of Elizabeth II upn the detah of her beloved Prince, that “grief is the price we pay for love.” It is the scars that we bear that remind us that the past was real. It was the bittersweet memories he had of his time together with Livy that were the last remnants of his erstwhile fatherhood, and he’d be Goddamned if he would try to suppress them even in the teary hours of the night as he lay in bed hoping for sleep to overtake him.

“As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.”

– 1984, George Orwell

            Tommy combed the internet regularly, looking for any sign of his daughter. There were a few snippets here and there, old stuff mostly about Livy’s ballet class but little else. She had disappeared from his life by and large, and even if he thought about trying to find her, he didn’t know where to look. Tommy assumed she was living with her grandparents and her mother up in Chiba, but that was just speculation on his part. He really had no idea where to actually look for her. Strangely, that all changed when a random student of his at one of his gigs — a continuing education class — approached him after class and told him he had some information about his daughter.

            Tommy was shocked at this odd incident. The student told him that he was a father too and that he felt sorry about what had happened to him, offering to help him learn about what had become of his daughter. Turns out this guy had, in fact, a great deal of information about which Tommy was previously unaware, including where his daughter’s mother worked and what university Livy was attending. How he had come about this information, Tommy didn’t know, but there it was. Tommy felt more than a little bit uncomfortable about this bizarre intrusion into his personal life by a man he had only recently met in his after-hours English course, yet he could not help but want to know more. The extent of the details this person brought before him was truly overwhelming.

            One of the things he came to find out was that Livy was no longer using her mother’s last name, but in fact was using the last name of the man Tommy knew his ex-wife had been having an affair with while they were married. This was a new revelation as the information he had about her last name was by way of a “nastygram” from a lawyer working on behalf of Livy’s mother and Livy herself threatening him with a lawsuit unless he scrubbed the internet of all mention of Livy on left-behind parent sites and the like. This had all come about after Tommy had published an article in a local magazine detailing his experiences as a left-behind father and which mentioned his ex by name.
Armed with this new knowledge — Livy’s new last name and the university she was attending — Tommy was able to find mentions of her in school publications. Not only that, but now that he knew her new last name, Tommy was able to see pictures of Livy on her Facebook account. It just had never occurred to him to search under his ex-wife’s lover’s last name. But there she was, emerging from the void after years of absence.

            What he found, though, distressed him. Not only did she bear the name of the adulterer who played a big part in the dissolution of his marriage to his faithless wife, but in short bios he read from her she is now telling the world that she was not half-American, half-Japanese, but instead, half-New Zealand, half-Japanese. He also learned from her mother’s social media account that his ex-wife set her marriage date as occurring a full six months before the date that he had married her. And oddly, exactly one year before Livy’s birth.

Livy’s entire life now, he thus learned, was predicated on a massive lie. Tommy had been utterly erased from his daughter’s life by way of the artifice of a faithless wife and the man she slept with throughout her marriage to him. Tommy finally understood why Livy had never reached out to him over the past twenty years, fearful of the world learning the truth of where she really came from. Tommy figured this lie appeared on all of her bios, resumes, and social media accounts, and understood the danger that she faced had the world learned the reality of her existence. It was not enough to remove Livy from her life, Tommy’s very existence needed to be obliterated. And so, while the Japanese legal system rendered him an un-parent by law, Livy’s mother and her paramour felt it necessary to erase him entirely from the picture as if he had never existed.

            Such was the reality he now lived in. As far as Japan was concerned, there was no Tommy DeVito. He had become a phantom, a figment of somebody’s imagination, a non-person as far as his daughter was concerned. This was, indeed, the unkindest cut of all. The futility of a once hoped for reunion now became apparent to him. He had truly lost her to this cruel fiction.

“If a man dwells on the past, then he robs the present. But if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future. The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past.”

– Master Po, “The Tide”, Kung Fu television series

            Tommy remembers reading somewhere some advice a Buddhist monk had given about how to avoid slipping into depression. The monk said that if you are already troubled, it’s not a good idea to sit alone in a room listening to sad music. Sounded very sensible, he thought, and yet that is what he found himself doing increasingly often these days. Tommy knew it wasn’t a good idea, but he did it anyway. Because, he thought, that’s all he had left of her, and nobody was going to take that away from him.

           Tommy called this The Well of Sadness, a place to which you go even though you know you should not. He was seemingly driven by an unquenchable thirst to feel, to somehow connect with that which once was, but is no more. Across a seemingly limitless desert he would trek, feeling the searing heat of the unadulterated sun upon his back, while he tried in the bright light of day to make sense of the loss and alienation that had become his life.

           The vast expanse of endless sand – this emptiness – served to place some distance between himself and that which he knew would cause him pain. The desert has no memory, and so he could become lost in a wilderness of his own making, where the bad things could not harm him. The starkness allowed no place for the monsters to hide.

            Inevitably, though, he would thirst and he knew he must drink. The memories are the only thing, he believed, capable of hydrating his withered soul, and restoring this shell of a father, this man both with child yet without child, this once upon a father, this curious artifact of a family living alone in his now empty home. Left behind.

            Thus, he would make his way to the Well. There the water was cool and refreshing. It let him experience ever so briefly the happiness that he felt as a parent in days gone by, in that place that was displaced from him in time. It reminded him that it was real, that even though he wandered through the desert now as one cast aside, it had really happened, that once he was Daddy to a little girl. Yet the water in the Well, he knew, was unsafe to drink. Memories that bring most parents delight inevitably cause intense pain, and he would always find himself doubled over, cursing the ladle that brought the water to his lips. And though he knew that he must stop, the Well called unto him, and invited him to drink. “More. More.” And he could not resist.

            The house in which he now dwelt had become a museum, dedicated to the memory of his only child. Here were the dusty toys he had bought for her on those many birthdays and Christmases. There were the books they once read together, now left unread, their pages yellowing with age as they sat forgotten upon the shelf. There were the pictures on the wall that evoked memories of amusement parks they had been to and of family gatherings with grandparents, uncles and aunts, and cousins who once played and laughed and ate together.

            He had thought about moving – getting out of this place that held so many bittersweet memories of the kid. Being here was most often painful for him now, and yet he never could bring himself to leave. Here is where she took her first baby bath, walked her first steps, and spoke her first words. The park up the street is where he pushed her on the swing, where they dug in the sand pit together, and where they lit sparklers in the summertime. These are the streets where first he carried her, then pushed her in the stroller, and later held her hand as they walked together. No, as much as it pained him to stay, he knew he couldn’t leave this place behind, leave whatever was left of her behind. The memories this place evoked was all he had left of her now, and so he resigned himself to being this ghost of a father who haunted the past of the love he and the kid had once shared together. Here is where he would remain, despite the contradictory desire in his soul to flee the torment that besieged this now daughterless father, this aging receptacle of what he used to be which existed now only in his mind.

            Tommy knew what only the left-behind parent knew – that the heart doesn’t break just once, but over and over again, every day of your life. There is no such thing as “closure” when you lose a child. While it may be true that the frequency of the painful episodes may decrease somewhat with time, it always lurks just beneath the surface and threatens to attack without notice at the slightest trigger – the sound of a little girl giggling somewhere outside, an advertisement for the Cartoon Network on TV, a hair clip found between the folds of the sofa, or the sight of the baby’s drinking cup in the kitchen cabinet that has been seen a hundred times before, but for some reason causes an unexpected trip “down memory lane” this time. The sadness, he knew, came unexpectedly, like a rogue wave on an otherwise relatively peaceful sea which threatens to capsize and drown you in the immensity of your grief.

            Parental alienation was not something that you “get over” or recover from but is rather akin to learning to live with a disability and make adjustments to so that you can somehow function as a “normal person” in the outside world. While at first the pain is on full display for friends and family to see, at some point you try to keep it to yourself as much as possible out of a sense of shame and the belief that you have to “man up” and “get on with your life.” Tommy’s father once told him in reference to his ex that he “shouldn’t let her ruin your life,” and yet the damage has already been done — the ruination was an unalterable fact. This is not to say that you curl up in a fetal position in the corner and stop living your life, but instead it is simply an acknowledgement that in many ways you know you will never truly be the same as you were before – that something has been irretrievably lost. And so you learn to wait until the darkness of night descends in your house and cry alone when no one else is around to hear it.