Reflections of a Distance Traveled by Carey Parrish
Sitting alone, in the quiet of the night, listening to Diana Ross' Blue album, I find my thoughts drifting backward to times less content. Episodes of the past, which are dead and gone, illuminate themselves in my mind like spectres of a life lived long ago. The roads I have traveled. The hurts I have endured. The pain I have overcome. Ghosts from the recesses of my mind materialize slowly, steadily, until they are all around me. Not haunting me. No, haunting is too strong a word. Remembrances are a better description. Some vivid, some shadowy. They each reflect a time and a place where I have been and where I am thankfully no more.
The time I see, in my mind's eye, is a span between the late seventies and the early to mid eighties. A time when my family was prosperous and outwardly happy. Appearances are indeed deceiving. I am a teenager in this reflection. I am still at home. My father is slipping into a years long affair with alcohol. His moods shift as easily and as recklessly as waves on the ocean. He sees me as the outlet for all the pains he endured when he was a child. Namely a mother who didn't love him enough. He uses me as a verbal punching bag. He vents all the frustrations of his own young life at me. His words echo over the years like sharp daggers from their own time. No longer can they hurt me, and yet they deliver a sting in my recollection of them. "You don't fit in.""You're stupid and you'll never amount to anything.""You're a disappointment to me.""This diabetes you've foisted on us is an embarrassment to me.""You're weak and you don't have any guts." Why do I remember these things so clearly? I knew it was the alcohol but he honestly seemed to hate me when he was like that. Why didn't anyone come to my rescue? Now, in my clarity as an adult, I see that people did come to my rescue but at the time it was like I had been abandoned; at the mercy of a mean drunk who hated me. I finally escaped when I left home for college. Years would pass before I could let that old hurt go and live my life in the manner that I so desired. Cycles are hard to break indeed.
Another reflection looms before me. College. Harding University. Searcy, Arkansas. A happy time in my life after leaving the brutality I suffered at the hands of my father at home. My best friend from high school, Kevin, is my roommate at Harding. We shared an apartment off campus that our parents rented for us. No more was I verbally abused on an almost daily basis. I went to class. I studied. I partied. Kevin was the fraternal twin I had always wished I had. Although I would have wished the abuse I had endured at home on no one. Those happy years went by all too fast. I was content. The innocence of youth is a cliche that is all too familiar as I remember this time in my life. A time that was destined to end. One can't stand still. Life doesn't unfold in that manner. Standing still would be the equivalent of a living death. No, I couldn't do that. College ended. Kevin and I went our separate ways. Into our futures. Did I tell him how much he meant to me? I hope so...
I am ending my marriage in the reflection which now floats into my mind. I am happier than I have been in a long time. The future looks bright for the first instance in a long while. I am shedding a heavy weight that was bearing down on me like Atlas' rock. I shrugged first this time. Shook up my entire way of life. It was a good shake. A necessary shrug which threw off a few years of unhappiness and made my path into the future a clearer, brighter course to travel. This is a nice reflection.
I was on my own and doing just fine. The hurts of the past seemed like distant memories. Life was good. My career was sailing along. I had everything I wanted. I was happy. This reflection is suddenly marred by the intrusion of cancer. It didn't seem fair. It wasn't fair. I had spent many years living with diabetes, overcoming the hauntings of abuse, reveling in the end of a marriage that was stifling. I had it all together for the first time and then cancer barged in, changing everything. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with my cancer. All I knew was that I had to do whatever I had to do. I was too young to die. I wanted to live. I dug in with both heels and a firm resolve battle it out to the end. Chemotherapy and radiation followed suit. Baldness. Radiation burns. Chemo sickness. Wasting syndrome. Anemia. I ran the gamut of the complications of cancer treatments. I went through this four times. Each episode was worse than the one which preceeded it. Cancer was like a wolf running after me, always at my heels, and I had to keep charging ahead to outdistance it. I learned a lot about myself during this dark journey. Nary a recess in my soul was left unexplored. By the time it was all over, after the fourth round of treatments, followed by a bone marrow transplant for which my own brother was the donor, I had emerged as a new person. This me was a different creature than the one who had come before. This me was grateful for every moment. This me was ready to love everyone. This me was more than able to lay down all the pain of the past and move forward. Holding on to pain is a futile and useless waste of time. Cancer ravaged my body but not my soul. My spirit flew after its departure. This reflection, as dark as it promised to be, was lightened by a brilliant flash of grace from God. This reflection is how I know that there is a God.
I have to say goodbye to my Granny. This is where I am now in my sole journey through the distance I have traveled. Granny was my best friend. She gave me a refuge when I needed it the most. She was the one I could tell everything to and who would love me in spite of anything I might reveal. Granny was one of the safest places in my entire life. She had been declining for several months. Stomach cancer was finally named the culprit for the ailment which was taking her away from me. I watched her get weaker and smaller. I watched her suffer and hurt. I saw a proud woman slowly give up the will to live. She had no choice. Her independence went first. That was the worst of it. This climactic act in the play of her life was not her decision to make. She accepted her path as I had accepted my lot in life. When the curtain fell on her final performance, it was with a sense of relief that I watched her go back to God. All her pain and suffering was at an end. I could grieve for myself and the loneliness I felt without her, but I could never grieve for her. Reflecting on this is a dance with two distinct partners. One mocks me while the other comforts me. I embrace each of them, as I embraced the loss of Granny, and I compel them to become one.
He has died now. My father has died. The recollection of this reflection is still so fresh in my mind. It only happened a tad over a year ago. He went quickly. A heart attack. The last several years had brought a closure of sorts to our past together. We just never talked about it. His drinking had ebbed. He was mellowing in his encroaching old age. His idea of dealing with the past was to ignore it; to behave as if it had never happened. I played his game because he would never play mine. He wasn't the type of man to ever apologize for anything. No matter how wrong he may have been. He saw himself as entitled to do whatever he did, and that was that. I played his game because forcing him to play mine would have resulted in both of us losing the prize. I looked down at him, laying in his casket, a life over, and I forgave him everything. I didn't forgive him for his sake. I forgave him for mine. I needed it all to end. And so it did. Mercifully, it did.
The ghosts are receding now. The reflections are slipping away into the mists of my mind. I have laid my soul bare. Again. For these images have come to me before...and they will come again. I know they will come again. I welcome them in a sense. I embrace them for all the knowledge and all the lessons they have taught me. They no longer bring pain. I have learned to appreciate the contributions they make in my life. Their incorporation in my psyche is a large part of the tapestry that is me. The distance I have traveled to reach the place where I am now would be incomplete without them. I accept them for the simple reason that I cannot deny them, and I would not be the person I have become without them.
Where I came from, who I once was, and how I got from there to here...these are the spectres of the life I have lived. These reflections of a distance traveled are like a chapter I have closed, and yet can revisit on a whim. I know more clearly with each visitation that nothing entirely leaves us.
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." --William Blake
