In Memoriam

A Visitor
Mary Oliver

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

My father had hazel eyes, like me. And his only meanness perhaps the egoistic conviction we would all be better off without him. But I have wandered through this landscape enough to admit that the voices of his despair spoke louder than love, leaving him nothing but a narrow track with a dark conclusion. How much more indestructable is our own internal half-logic!

If you consider time as our fourth dimension, it may be easier for you to acknowledge the existence of an echo effect; ripples from long ago events that make themselves felt years later. I don't mean the way the past shapes the future--nothing that simplistic-- this is more a cyclic effect, often subconscious, that earlier meaningful events affect our feelings, maybe on their anniversaries, or every couple of years (surely one could allow that if such effects were ripples, they might begin to occur every month and gradually widen to every year, then every other, and so on, as the emotional wake, if you will, subsides). Now I buy this theory (because I made it up, fine, but really, there's more), because I notice that every year or so, right around now I become melancholy and introspective. It comes over me gradually and I often think, what the heck is up with me? Why this mood change? And eventually I think, oh right, it's August. The wrong time in the solar year, maybe, to think about change and uncertain futures, but the right time in my personal calendar, here around the anniversary of my father's death. And I love this poem (can't forget the poem) because of the redemption at the end, the softening, the forgiveness. I too, have gone round and round in years past, chasing my mental tail, trying to reason it through on some days and trying not to think of it or agonizing over it on others. The bitterness, the swollen lip, these things for me are post-mortem; they are caused by the refusal to see, to acknowledge the ugly parts of the past and the difficult and contradictory emotions caused by death. How needed, how essential is that ease at the end, the ability to say, I forgive you (and likewise myself, for my anger and my guilt about my anger). This moment also comes more often as the years do, and the whole thing softens into grey hues from its original hard lines. My father's ghost is my harbinger of uncertainty, of anxiety, of fear of loss. But I must greet his ghost some nights, and pare away the symbolism, and there he is my father again, and I a child, with a child's love, and I am simply allowed to miss him.