father son & wholly ghost

My parents died when I was a teenager, but that death was not permanent. My mother returned as the inner manifestation of my desire for purity and truth. Quietly, deep inside my heart, I recognized that her death had impelled me down the path of transformation and spiritual surrender. I saw that my search for virtue was actually a dedication and offering made in her memory. I wanted to repay her loving kindness. I wanted to make her proud.

My father, overcome with grief at the loss of his wife, was left alone with a burning and unresolved anger. He suffered through alienation, isolation, and pain. A well of bitterness trickled up inside of him, and after several vain attempts to reconnect and heal our relationship I gave up on him in anger and grief.

Eventually I realized that the image I carried of my mother was blurring into a generic concept of the divine mother. Terrified, realizing that I was losing my connection to her humanity, I set out on a journey of memory and recollection (a powerfully intriguing and curious topic in itself) to reconstruct a sense of who exactly she was, this woman Catarina Vieira. I spent the summer with her sister, Diana, panning for stories hidden amonng dusty neural pathways. Diana, whose presence also triggered strong memories of my own, her mannerisms and behavior so reminiscent of my mother, was a powerfully loving and grounding force for me.

At the end of that summer, I paid a visit to some of my mother's oldest friends in San Jose. It was there, unexpectedly, that I collected a final piece which illuminated the bare soul of my father, and I saw my parents' lives intersecting like rivers of change and causality, matched to each other hopelessly like magnetized tuning forks. At their core, I saw the vividness of the tragedy that pushed them, the forces that shaped them, and the brilliant hearts that struggled to unravel the gordian knot of their own pasts. I am, without fail, a product of their passions, their lives continue in my own.

My mother's image has been restored, complete with the tarnish of her personal flaws and failings. I honor her humanness, her transformation, her fierce capacity to love. Even more surprisingly, my father has emerged from his bitter mourning to become for me a source of joy and wisdom. Once I had feared that time and pain could irrevocably change a human heart, choking it off from compassion and happiness, like sun-baked clay, too hardened to be reshaped. He demonstrated something very powerful to me, something just as powerful as what my mother showed me in her dying - the courage to heal, to renew, to open again after the terrible storm has passed. No matter what age, it is never too late.

It's remarkable how well those two go together, twin lessons of death and renewal. But by now I'm certain, there's something remarkable about my parents as well.