Courtesy of Mary Gaitskill.

Before my father died in 2001, I knew that I loved him but only dimly. I didn’t really feel it, and to the extent that I did, I experienced it as painful. When he was dying I almost didn’t go to him. When I was trying to decide whether to go, someone asked me, “Do you want to see him?” And I said, “That’s hard to say. Because when you’re with him you don’t see him. He doesn’t show himself. He shows a grid of traits but not himself.” Still, I decided to go. The death was prolonged. It was painful. Because of the pain, the “grid” that I referred to—my father’s style of presentation—could not be maintained. A few days after I arrived, my father lost the ability to speak more than a few words at a time. But his eyes and his face spoke profoundly. I saw him and I felt him, and I loved him more than I thought possible. I was stunned by both the strength of my feeling and my previous obliviousness to it, and by my realization that, if I had not come to see him, I would never have known how real my feeling was or how beautiful it was to say it and to hear it said.

I recall that, at the time, I had a mental picture of this experience that looked like one of those practical joke containers disguised as a can of nuts or something; you open the lid and a coiled cloth-covered spring leaps out at you—it felt that startling. This image was followed by another mental picture, an image of human beings as containers that hold layers and layers of thought, feeling, and experience so densely packed (“the body remembers everything”) that the (human) container can be aware of only a few layers at a time, usually the first few at the top, until and unless an unexpectedly powerful event makes something deep suddenly pop out, throwing some elements of the “self” into high relief and disordering others, hinting at a different, truer order that was there all along. Read More