It’s morning in June, just about to transition to summer and it’s Father’s Day. Not sure where this day comes from, but it feels as though it’s significant this year in a way that it never was when my father was still alive. Significant in a social remembering sort of way. Significant in a “some of my father’s ashes are in my closet waiting to be scattered across Lake Superior when a full year has passed” sort of way. Is it that different than my life when I still had a living dad? On a practical, day to day basis, no. We didn’t talk every day and sometimes a full month might pass. But the sense that the paternal backstop, the ultimate moral hazard, someone who knew me and yet didn’t know me isn’t here anymore, here in the sense of being presently alive. He’s “gone”, “passed away”. Do I still owe what I’ve felt like I owe? The continuity of a family narrative of possibly progressively more responsible fathers on the fathers’ side? I’m not sure how far back that goes, but I don’t think I owed it even ten months ago. Family balance sheets, unspoken liabilities: optional investment vehicles with vaguely negative returns. And so here I sit, here in the senses that I understand them, looking out at an early morning late sunrise, watching the windlessly stationary trees and listening to the crows wake up the neighborhood, flipping through the “financial statements”. I don’t need to create a dénouement or real wealth. I don’t even need to have a family of my own to extend the paternal line (or any line). But I do need to think about the past and be present in the past sometimes. Remembering isn’t the same as paying overdue debts. And forgetting isn’t the only way to be present. What is recovering but archaeology, going and digging up the fossils, identifying them, ageing them, and telling a compelling and possibly true story about their origins? Today is a day of being in the dusty sun with a shovel and a toothbrush.
Expectations and stories are the beginnings of debts. I wonder is Sisyphus’s rock-pushing will ever overcome the accrued interest. I don’t think so, even if he pushed the boulder over the other side of the hill. To kindly refuse to push the boulder again is the way to debt relief. Because to pay narrative debt is to reinforce the story, and a good story like a good virus does not let its host fully pay it down. I’m not a fool about narrative debt; I don’t expect to avoid it in my life. But I do expect to catalogue it as it comes in to the warehouse, process it, and send it back out into the world (to breathe it in and breathe it all the way out). And usually these are collaborative digestion processes, where we get our gut bacteria together, they take a long look at what we’ve dropped down to them, and they get to work. Ideally without a poop transfusion. Here is why writing is so valuable: without having to mix gut bacteria, one can articulate in the language of debt (words & sentences) the fact of the debts, their inflections and valences, their histories, and the method to break them down into waste that can be then composted or sent along to the municipal sewer authority. If there is a thing that life needs to do, it’s to break down the things that it ingests and metabolize part of those things into energy. Debts are not meant to be paid, they’re meant to be digested. I think my dad knew this about his life, perhaps for a long time. He had digested life and done what he did and felt that when his body wouldn’t function anymore, the debts were fully digested. So he faced death with calm, unhappy with the breakdown and the end, but accepting and peaceful with the facts. I think the lesson for me is that I can face life with calm, be unhappy with breakdowns and endings, and accept peacefully the facts as they appear. It certainly feels easier with a deep breath in and all the way out, in the morning, in June, with a cup of coffee and raucous, invisible birds. The gut bacteria are humming along.
Roman Ryan 