Did you know that Ash trees can rebuild an ecosystem? Simply the presence of their roots and leaves strengthens the ground and provides a home for sweet little creatures. I thought of that when we picked up my father’s ashes recently. A life giving plant having the same name as the last vestiges of my father’s human life, the ceremonial avatar of his death.
The dichotomy feels so fitting to my experience of life after his departure from us. Outside of scripture or platitudes I’ve never had any guidance or discussion around the experience of grief. Like many human experiences, I wish we talked about it so much more, and so much more casually. I expected to be drowning in an unbearable, clawing despair but it’s (very fortunately) not been like that at all. Instead it’s like I woke up one morning in a new house; the toaster’s not in the spot where I keep reaching for it. The shift of every element of my life as I knew it is sometimes amusing, and sometimes profound, and sometimes so deeply upsetting I can’t see through the tears. But I still make my toast and eat breakfast and get along with my day.
All lucky children must bury their parents. Perhaps there is something natural in it that is some small comfort to me, although it cannot be a comfort to anyone besides me and my sister. If my grief is a new house, my mother’s is a new universe. My father was only 62 years old when he died. They had been married for over three decades. They expected to have a few more. For a widow, there is very little comfort in grief, I think.
The having of a past together does not make the present anymore pleasant, nor the future anymore bright for a widow. It’s just loss; a wound waiting to heal and doing so too slowly.
In many ways, I’ve always admired my parents’ marriage, not necessarily for how halcyon or full of ease it was but for how woven they were into each other’s lives. They always seemed to me to be two complex people braiding together two lives while I spent a lot of time growing up amidst marriages that seem to be two people battling for space within one life. I’m not sure how recommended of a marriage or family structure the one I was privy to is but it certainly made for a depth of feeling and color that I find is still so central to the way I see life.
As a burgeoning young adult (and maybe I still am one, who knows? I increasingly feel that sneaking pressure to just get on with it already), I had an incorruptible commitment to my life going a certain way. My future was a little board game road, and there was to be no stepping outside the squares, (fast forward to my current reality where the game board is just a soggy, trodden over mass.) In comparison, the early, winding, unpredictable days of my parents’ marriage sounded like such an adventure, one that some part of me feared I was missing out on (I was.) They had so many stories and loved to tell them in tandem, like a musical orchestration in perfect time.
One of my favorites is the one that is the keystone for this photo. And it’s such a great photo: my young parents beaming smiles over the wreckage of this poor vehicle.
Let’s see if I can do it justice. My mom says when she moved to America and married a handsome young G.I., my halmooni (that’s grandmother to you neophytes) would call her and tell her that everyday she prayed to god that her daughter might find a house of her own. To that generation of Korean matriarchs displaced by the war, to own a home was a sacred thing; not the oft unceremonious tick of a box for the lucky few who manage it in our times. A home was the foundation of all luck and happiness to halmooni. She wanted her daughter settled in her luck and happiness.
My father was just exiting the army at the time and figuring out civilian work as most do for a while when transitioning. He, my mom, and my sister bopped around as he looked for a situation to settle in and a house was too far past the horizon of even their thoughts. One weekend, my dad packed everyone in the car to get away for a little trip, a sweet habit he never kicked even throughout my life. They went to the sparkling mecca of ~Baltimore~ to take my sister to the National Aquarium. When all that was to be seen and done had been achieved (which in Baltimore can apparently be achieved within two days) they slipped back in the car to return to weekly life.
On the easy drive to Pennsylvania, my mom reached back from the passenger seat to make sure my sister’s car seat was properly secured. She recalls a moment, as she turned back around where everything that was supposed to be down was suddenly up. A cold pain started radiating in her left knee and she felt my dad’s arm bang into her chest.
A drunk driver had run them off the road, sending their car cascading in barrel rolls down a long ditch. She always says she will remember what she ate for lunch that day for the rest of her life (spaghetti and meatballs) because the first thing she did upon falling from the vehicle at the bottom of the ditch was throw it up. She looked back at the demolished car unable to do anything but panic for my dad and my sister who were still stuck inside.
The accident left three relics behind: a thick web of scars on my mom’s left knee, my dad’s right arm, and the insurance payment that bought their first house. My sister was unharmed, as her carseat supporting the roof during the crash was the only reason any of them survived.
It is the house I sit in right now as I write this, the one we grew up as a family in, the seat of all my mom’s luck and happiness (and much of mine too.) My dad’s friends and colleagues knew he wasn’t solvent enough to purchase a home and when they asked how he did it he always said, “My wife is rich.”
A forest is razed to the ground. A seed remains. The new tree’s roots knit the land back together. The blossoms return. From the ash, all things begin again.
The Prompts
Do you believe you have good luck, or bad luck?
What’s the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?
If you were granted perfect luck, what would happen to you tomorrow?