Standing in front of Dad’s gravestone
It’s 8am, standing in front of my dad’s gravestone, having stupid thoughts like “such even numbers on this stone”. Dad was born in 1940 and passed in 2010. What is it that in the evenness of these dates that caught my eyes and my mind?
As I look around, I see the names of people I used to know. The fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers of friends and neighbors. People I liked, people I hardly knew. Some names remind me of happiness, others have no noticeable impact on me. Dad’s grave evokes loss, missed occasions, unsaid words. A feeling of deep respect mixed with the idea of emptiness arises in me. There are times when thinking of him brings up a bitter taste of guilt in my mouth, guilt associated to the un repairable fact of my absence the day he died. This morning, I feel just the loneliness of a son missing his guiding light. Even though, at the end of his life, our ways to look at existence had been diametrically opposites, his teachings and advices had a durable impact on my personal development all through my younger years way up to my late fourties. I never had gotten the chance to discuss that with him and never will.
Dad had led his life following a few very simple guidelines: work hard, respect your neighbor, never owe anything to anyone and always do more than the best you can. Enjoying life and living easy was to be procrastinated. He never got the chance to catch up with it, since he died shortly after retiring. The evenness of the dates on his gravestone seem to fit perfectly into this scheme. Life according to evenly outlined rules. Neatly arranged, properly piled up. I loved my father more than I can say and for those same unwritten rules I never managed to tell him. These “things” were not to be said loudly. Now I can only miss his loving kindness, his calm advice and helping hands. The loss of his physical presence at my side…
An old lady slowly walks up to me as I swallow these thoughts. I can feel her increasing presence before even raising my eyes to look at her. “Is that really you? I wasn’t sure at first “, she said while wrapping my right hand in both of hers. Her hands feel warm and dry. “You miss him a lot don’t you?”. Her eyes are filled with tears. “I do” is my answer. She speaks of her husband. Of him dying in her arms in front of the entry of the emergency room, of the unsuccessful attempts of the doctors to reanimate him and of the awful instant when she and her daughter had to take the decision to allow them to shut off the machinery, keeping his empty body artificially functioning. In spite of my efforts to remember the person she speaks about, I just can’t put a face on the name she mentions.
The old lady says something about my mother suffering from Dad’s absence, gives me a wonderful hug, full of kindness and honest feelings, and slowly walks away. As she passes by her husbands grave, she stops, signs herself and continues her walk away from the row of graves towards the gate. My eyes follow her. My heart is full of emotions. There’s not really a tidal wave of grief in me, sadness is present but balanced by the awareness of my newly found ability to feel these emotions. A sudden gratefulness wipes away the sadness linked to my Dad’s death. That gratefulness due to sort of a healing process induced by the pain I felt after his death. It’s not that I am thankful for the end of my mourning, since I am not done with that. But rather of the fact that this mourning, the feeling of helplessness and of guilt it has brought up, has also given me a chance to start a different period of my life.
It’s like I had restrained all types of emotions from my life for 35 years, not allowing myself to surrender to fear or love. And the cataclysm Dad’s death has provoked inside of myself seems to have wiped away all of these self imposed restrictions in one single stroke. Oh, I fought against it for 6 long years. But deep down I knew that the battle was already lost during that time. Then my nearly passing away in 2016 gave me that last strike, the final one, the one that could only be responding to by complete surrender. I did , I surrendered.
Today, I can say, quoting Geronimo, “I will fight no more”. And, finally I can admit that those lost battles, were after all nothing more than an awakening. A victory over fake values, wrong goals, bad habits.
I don’t regret anything I did in my life so far. Dad will always be inside of my heart, but also missed. But then, this state of sudden awareness I got as a gift is very precious to me. For 35 years I fought against my feelings and against the urge for creativity I carried with me all of my life. Now that I start slowly to allow myself to go free from these restrictions, it all just bursts out. I feel sort of an emotional and creative frenzy I haven’t known since my adolescent years. And it feels good. It feels liberating. The emotions I felt, during the few minutes the old lady spoke to me at the graveyards, thus didn’t overwhelm me, simply because I felt glad to be able to feel them. I was thankful to have gained the capacity to be sad, thankful to share the sorrow of that old woman.
My artwork is most likely a catharsis linked to all of this. I feel an immense need to create, to paint, to let the colors speak. And when I paint I feel at times an unspeakable pleasure, something very close to happiness. Real happiness that has absolutely nothing to do with achievement or pride. Just pure good emotions. It may sound a bit melodramatic, but I think that Hamid Sepahzad’s spiritual ecstacy is close to what I feel at these moments. In fact, I just feel alive, aware of existing. And it feels ok…
