Crescent Moon

My father died one year ago today, leaving the rest of us behind to learn how to live without him. To this day he remains the gentlest man I have ever met—and one of the most imaginative. As a child, he taught me that nothing was impossible; no quest was too crazy, no puzzle unsolvable, and no defeat permanent.

Whatever I did, he was always there. In high school, he built his academic schedule around my sports seasons, teaching classes on practice days so he could be at every game. As soon as the referee’s whistle sounded, he was off, tearing up and down the sidelines, cheering us on.

His support extended far beyond the boundaries of any athletic field. Whatever I read, we read together—and no topic was off-limits. When I briefly flirted with radical feminism, he faithfully waded through dense texts that were deeply alienating. When that phase thankfully ended, he was ready to plunge full-steam ahead into the next, exploring Manhattan, movies, food, and medicine voraciously. He was always up for an adventure, no matter how wild or crazy.

My father had a rare way of transforming the world, and people’s perceptions of them selves within it. When I was with him, I always felt like I was the center of his world. But, as I learned after his death, I was one of many people who felt that way. My father was a safe haven for hundreds of other people. He inspired many generations of psychologists, challenging them to spread their wings and explore new grounds, and whenever they encountered an obstacle, he found a way around it, steadfastly sticking by them through turbulent times.

So how are we now to live without him? And, how are any of us to move through life—to continue breathing—without our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, or life-partners? I cannot answer this question, but today I think of a few stanzas from a poem written by Barbara Kingsolver, entitled High Tide:

“In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of a red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

It's not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.”