Absent Parentage
18 years.
Dear mom,
We’ve achieved a fascinating milestone together. As of now, we will always have had more time apart than with each other. Before your death, we had almost 17 years together, and now, we’ve had 18 apart. For most, the amount of time they have with their parents far exceeds the amount of time they do not. Many of my friends still have grandparents alive for that matter. Yet here we are, you and I, with our distance expanding like space itself.
In the years following your death, I spent several of them feeling as if my age and my reality were out of alignment. While friends were at college, I was progressing in my career already. When people were at spring break, I was at conferences. When people were drinking... I was drinking with them. Ok, so maybe not everything was out of alignment.
Alas, your early death and my late teenage years were at an interesting cross-section. On one hand, several components of my personality were already well formed by your upbringing. On the other, a multitude of gaps were left that I had to stumble through life to find answers to. Such as: “What the fuck is a W2?” and “What does a healthy relationship look like?” Your absence meant that my life’s oddities and crossroads had no hotline for me to call.
After your death, I felt like I was launched off of an aircraft carrier. A commercial takeoff is gentle, with a restricted climb to make it comfortable for the souls aboard. In our situation, I had to grab the cockpit handle, give a salute, and have my organs rearranged as I was catapulted out over an open ocean with no time to correct if something went wrong.
They may not know it, but I adore spectating the people closest to me interacting with their parents. It never takes long before a parent gives some type of advice in a conversation. I don’t think they can help it. As far as I can tell, parents never stop being parents. They’re keen to advise, protect, and foster. It’s a default setting that has no off switch. They are always there to provide guidance, similar to air traffic control. I’ve also come to realize that the sudden departure of a parent such as yourself is also a (bleak) way of tutelage itself.
Which is why I think this milestone we have together now, more time apart than together, is so fascinating. Because in a way, half of what makes me is your masterpiece and the other is a strange amalgamation of my own style of growing up. I had the dumb luck of having an incredible group of friends around me. Pairing that with drum corps, relationships, career progression, founding FireHydrant, travel, sobriety, and a healthy dose of therapy has led to a mix that no one could have predicted the outcome of. I’m the human equivalent of a mutt. I think you’d love to see it in action.
It’s unnerving knowing that each day I wake up is one day more without a letter in return. This cold fact is amplified knowing that your infinite sabbatical will only add to the counter, never to reset it. But I’m here to say that at this juncture of time with and apart, I am thankful for your departure.
It’s macabre to say you’re “thankful” a parent has passed away. And I hope you know it’s not that I wished it, but more that there’s nothing more I can do but to thank you for it. There’s no sense in being resentful for your departure. Nor is it logical to carry on as if nothing happened. The only sensible thing I can do is mark December 23rd, 2007, as the day I lurched towards adulthood faster than I could have imagined.
It’s the day I took your unfinished map that you handed to me as I said goodbye at your hospital bedside, and had to begin filling in the directions myself. For 18 years now, that’s what I’ve been doing every single day.
And it was the gaps you left that had the most positive influences on my life.
So, to you, Ellen: The unfinished map you gave me is beautiful, and my adventures with it are forever ongoing. And I love you for it.
— Robert
This post is a follow up to a piece I wrote in 2017: Dear mom.