An Assumption of Soundness

Sometime between the April 1994 death of my father and the April 1995 death of my mother, I made a discovery that entwined a combination of poignant triggers. It was like wading into an emotional estuary with competing currents of love and loss.

I found a letter in the back bedroom of my childhood home that Dad had begun writing me while I was overseas. He never finished it.

I don't know if the missive was being composed near the day of his death from congestive heart failure, or if it had already waited weeks or months for him to return and conclude it before his life had its own conclusion.

His typically bold and forthright penmanship appeared shaken and uncertain. Descenders and ascenders belied his unsteady hand.

It seems that somewhere along the path of my own life, I discovered my parents had grown old. Their old age often startled me when I arrived for a visit, an undeniable reminder that the world had moved on from the simpler times of my childhood.

Dad's letter talked about golf and the golf balls he fished out of the creek along the fairway on the first hole. His letter insisted that I be careful while abroad and return to them safely.

I was pleased to have that correspondence. But, since the intervening months between its composition and my receipt of it brought my father's death, it held more metaphysical weight than it would otherwise.

Both my father and his father died when their own hearts turned on them after decades and decades of dedicated and faithful duty -- the daily thrumming and pumping in their chests. It occasionally makes me curious about my own heart and its unknown intentions.



After a while I found myself becoming nostalgic
for the way I thought I remembered it being
between my heart and me, a kind of continuum
of body and mind, an assumption of soundness,
that sense you have as a child of being in such a
full, weighty recline within yourself that things
like sitting on a porch or swinging in a hammock
seem unsettling redundancies.   -- Charles Siebert, A Man After His Own Heart