A Visitor by 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's Passing

My father finally passed.

His death was predicted many times by Doctors over the last 30 years since he and my mother suffered simultaneous heart attacks one day in May 1980. My mother died that evening at the age of 54. From then on we would have to learn how to relate to dad individually, apart from mom who had always been the source, the connective tissue that bound us all together as a family. She smoothed the rough edges and in doing so unknowingly instilled the beginnings of denial. She dutifully fed the myth of our family. Maybe she needed it to be real too. But it wasn’t. I long ago grieved my last for what might have been.

For those who knew him in a different light, I envy you. From one whom he never had a good word to say about, again, I envy you who he cherished. You were indeed lucky.

I will search for peace. Our war is over. There was no winner. The battle scars remain.