My melancholia

Who among us didn’t wish to be Peter Pan? To remain young forever, surrounded by friends like us, looking for some form of comfort and peace? A life in Neverland, never aging, forever chasing pirates and playing games, eating what you want when you want, and yet always alone, seeking connection.

Philosophers say that we all long for eternal life, whether by an extension of the one we are living, or through some other mechanism such as reincarnation, transcendence to a heavenly plane, or more pedestrianly, by leaving some legacy that ensures we live on in memory. We write books, create works of art, bring light to dark corners through science and math. But we do not remain. We pass.

As I age not so gracefully toward the day that none of us so far has escaped, I ask myself why… why would we cling so desparately to a life that is lived in constant suffering? A life told through stories of conflict — with others and within ourselves — of loss, and of the constant ache of never having “enough.”

The beauty of Peter Pan and the children of Neverland is that wonder and hope continue to exist, just as they do in real children. They experience the joy of friendship and marvel at the world and its many miraculous creatures. Life is filled with wonder and surprise. New tastes, sounds and smells, new experiences. And along the way we begin to feel the pains of life, physical injury, emotional abuse. Until, one day, the accumulated cuts and bruises of our childhood settle into the cracks in our joints, the pain and remorse of lost love driven deep into our veins, and the fear and abandoment leave their marks upon our souls.

I have seen the pain that losing a child through death brings. It is a loss so deep, so transformative, that it cannot be described in words. We of flesh cannot fathom non-physical existence of something we brought into the world. Death is something that comes to the old and infirm. Youth is a magic elixer that makes death, like old age, seem impossible. 

But what about the death brought by abandonment? The unknowing of it all. The unexplicable sense of being left behind for no apparent reason by someone who you loved and whom you thought loved you. A child left behind by a parent, as I and my brothers were, cannot make sense of the “whys” as there is no one left to explain them.

As a parent, I have also lost a child, abandoned in reverse by the body and soul that I carried inside me for nine months and for whom I cared for physically and emotionally every day of his life until I was so unceremoniously cast aside, cord cut, set afloat to wander aimlessly in search of the “why.”

But it is you who left, I hear him say in my dreams. You are the abandoner. But I didn’t leave. I would never leave. I could not ever leave. I am here still.

My love for you, Son, is aspacial and atemporal, existing beyond space and time, a universal ideal that can never die and from which You and I have been created and with which will forever be interwined.