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You used to quote a writer, Mary Gordon, who said, “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.” For a long time I didn’t understand what that meant or how it related to you. Now I do understand, and I think it’s true of fatherless boys as well. I certainly think it applies to me. When you lose a parent at an early age, you lose the fantasy of childhood. The veil is lifted. You learn that bad things happen and that no amount of crying or hugging will make them all right. Nothing is safe, and all things are possible: good things, beautiful things, but ugly and harmful things,
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“I suspect that being fatherless leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.” That is the full quote from Mary Gordon’s novel The Company of Women, and when I came across it, I knew it to be the foundation of my life. It explained countless actions I’d taken thoughtlessly. Unbeknownst to me, my life decisions had been based on this
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There are times even now when dark thoughts take over. Instead of fighting or pushing them away, I pursue each to its final destination. Entering the tunnel, I know I will circle back, as always, to the place I started from; wishing it had been me who died instead of your father. How much better he would have been at guiding you and Carter, far better than I could ever be.
I have heard it said that the greatest loss a human being can experience is the loss of a child. This is true. The person you were before, you will never be again; it doesn’t just change you, it demolishes you. The rest of your life is spent on another level, the level of those who have lost a child. If you are blessed with other children, you go on living to be there for them, but the loss will consume you at unexpected times for the rest of your life.
Is the pain less? No, just different. It is not something you “work through”; it is not something that goes away or fades into the landscape. It is there forever and ever, inescapable until the day you die. I have learned to live with it. Carter died twenty-seven years ago. There are times he comes to me in dreams, appearing as he would at the age he should be now. But these are fleeting images that vanish as I try to hold on to them. Carter is not here. He has no brilliant career. No loving wife he is crazy about. No son named Wyatt. No daughter named Gloria. He . . . they exist only in
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No truer statement made, we will never forget them
