I admit that my mother’s does most often. Every time I cook, which is every day, she makes her presence known. My father is not around as much. I do not know if this is because he has been gone longer or if he was not as forceful a presence. Both are true. But that said my father surfaces more while I am on the boat or in the basement working on a project. I suppose this is not surprising. They continue to affect me the way they did when they were alive.
And their dead presence, for lack of a better phrase, is more of a gap or chasm. They still offer suggestions. I can see the expressions on their faces. I can just pick out the hint of my father’s sarcasm and the I-don’t-know-what of my mother’s voice. She was more definitive in her speech, but then my home was matriarchal.
I find myself responding to them. Don’t worry; I do not do this aloud. It is more of an internal dialog. There is also nothing surprising in this. At least I do not think so. It makes me wonder about friends that have lost infants and children or lost their parents at a young age. The chasm is there but there is no voice to fill it. This must be painful in its inability to be resolved.
My profession leads to similar musings. In decades of practice many patients have died. Some of them after a fleeting encounter, but many after a decade long relationship. I learned early on to discount this least I go crazy. But forensic questioning starts on my part even if the reason for their death is obvious. And as I do this, a parade of deceased patients passes before my eyes. I try not to hinder their passage. They flow by one-by-one. It seems the only healthy thing to do.
In the millisecond they are once again in my consciousness it is odd that the entire experience is relived. The mind is an amazing chunk of protoplasm. I have heard it said that the brain is the most complex construct in the universe and that is probably true. All this happens in an instant and at this stage in my career I barely take notice.
This reliving is also a repository of knowledge. It is my biologically limited search engine. I think of a word or a set of symptoms, and let it free to roam through my interconnected neurons. I need some peace to do this. It does not have to be long but needs to be undisturbed. I have never had a phone in my exam rooms because of this. I turn my ringer/buzzer off now that we live in a world of constant distractions.
But I ramble. My conjecture is that absence is not the lack of something but is something. It is where everything we know comes from for if we began life filled up there would never be room to fit “us” in. Each of us is one-off and custom-made. And as we go through life we fill up the space that we are allotted and then in the end it is wipe clean. It may have helped fill another’s or it may not have, but that is the luck of the draw.
I have drawn parents and patients into my available space. It has created who I am for better or worse. It effects how I process every experience. It makes each day different and welcoming. Even in my sleep I hope that the sun will hurry up and rise, so I can get up and start trying to fill the finite space left in my mind. I try to fill the absence that I know will never be filled. I try to get something out of nothing. It is quite miraculous that in the end all we leave is absence.
June 2014
