“66.”

H,

We carry our damage around with us.  It is right there in how we fight and how we love. The foundational years and the vital years come together to create a monster in us we must learn to resolve. People who love us will suffer from this monster the most, and we will suffer from theirs as well. We must come to an armistice, surrender these famed weapons of survival, and give in to the vulnerable and uncomfortable parts of love as much as we give in to the thrilling and powerful parts of love.

It is like that old epigram about parents etched in an Oscar Wilde play and all that sardonic underpinning. It goes something like: “Children start by loving their parents; after a while, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” What kind of parents are we now? And what is left to forgive from the parents we had? The answer to both may be “everything”.

In the first we carry the new-fangled ideas of being cool and not like the past, but we are prone to impatience, to shutting down loud voices and to applying discipline out of anger or fear or both rather than love. In the second, we can now admit, apart from actual abuse, and we did not have that, we have human parents and not Olympian gods. They were damaged and they passed that on too. Time to forgive.

And in all this, today is the Ancient’s 66^th. Well, it would have been. I have been having dreams about him. I have been trying to resolve my feelings of this great loss when I sleep and not when I am awake. I do not want hugs or tears or pictures about. I want to be in a room with him again. To not be annoyed by his small failings, and they are small in retrospect of death and eternity, and to hold in my mind all the stories and all the laughter and all that furious joy. Love is the resolution of all this damage and eternity is the place where all love is fulfilled.