“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.
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