Parallel Planes

Two months ago I turned 60 years of age. I have found it to be unsettling and uncomfortable, and for this I have blamed my father.

My dad did not live to see his 62nd birthday. The days after he turned 60 were difficult ones, filled with hospital visits, physical deterioration and a grim reality that he was facing an obstacle that could not be overcome.

I have equated my sudden issue with days survived on earth with my dad's struggles. Like some wall that has to be scaled, I have to reach a birthday beyond his last, and then this feeling that grips me will disappear. But I don't think that it is fear of an early death that is the catalyst. Rather it is the troubling thought of losing, in very short order, the common life experiences shared by father and son.

For while my dad has been gone for over 3 decades, I have always been able to draw on images, photographic and internal, of him in parallel life plane to me. By my 62nd birthday, that will end, and an enormous void will be left. What will fill it?

Where do memories come from when there is nothing to remember? How does my dad continue with me on a journey that for him never happened?

I am a numbers person. I find figures as something with meaning and depth far beyond their original intent. My marriage is now of longer duration than that of my parents. I have already moved into certain uncharted territory and I am concerned that future days will only serve to accelerate the distance between my father's life and mine.

I find it surreal that my emotional connection to my dad remains so strong after all these years of separation. I expected that life's natural pulls would have taken me further and further away from him. But that has not occurred.

And so, on this Father's Day, I worry about a path never taken. My hope  is that 2 years from now, on Father's Day, I will still find my father waiting for me, ready to incorporate my continuing adventure as his own .No longer parallel planes, but one. A forged universe, not further apart, but together.