Touching Feeling

This weekend, Nate, Vickie, and I hosted our dad's memorial celebration.  It came together nicely and I feel like Dad would have been pleased with how it turned out.  I was touched by the people who made the effort to come and the things people said to me while I was there.  Maybe I'll feel like writing more about the memorial itself when I've had a little emotional distance to digest the event.

One of the things I worked on for the memorial was a slideshow of pictures so we could voice-over Dad's farewell message.  Putting the slideshow together was helpful for me.  Vickie had requested photos from several different people, and I enjoyed seeing which ones each contributor collected.  (Thanks to Mimi, Aunt Carrie, Mom, and Shaye for helping us put together a consolidated assortment.)  Vickie also helped me do some of the editing to decide which pictures to include, and it was fun to work on that with her.  Making the slideshow also helped me feel more connected with my dad.  I have always like taking photos, but I never knew how much I would enjoy editing and assembling them until I got a mac.  When I started making my mac photo books, the fun of the process was enhanced by how much Dad enjoyed looking at what I'd made.  Dad was the editor of his senior yearbook, so he knew all about editing and white space and all of that long before the technology made it easy.  It seems to me that one must have an eye for these things to be able to make them look right to other people, so finding that my Dad liked my photo collections so much made me feel like I had inherited that editorial eye from him.

One of the photos I knew I wanted to put in the slideshow is this one from my wedding.

When I think of my dad, this is how I think of him.  I realize that his death would have been even more difficult if I'd had unresolved issues with him, if I'd been unsure about how he felt about me, or if I felt like he was somehow disappointed in me.  I know I'm very fortunate that none of these things is the case.  On the contrary, my dad's death has been especially difficult because, over the course of my life, his love and his understanding been the strongest force I've known.  It's probably not fair to say he loved me more than anyone else, because I feel very well loved by all the people who are close to me.  But I've always felt my dad's love most profoundly and most consistently.  If love is spoken in different love languages, he spoke to me in mine.  It probably is fair to say he understood me better than anyone else.  Everyone has always told me how alike my Dad and I are, so maybe that explains it.   Being so similar meant we ended up in our fair share of fights, but it also meant he instinctively understood how I was feeling or how I was acting.  I love this photo because his body language and his expression capture exactly how I felt like he felt about me.

So when I was looking through the old photos people sent us, I couldn't believe that he has the exact same expression and nearly the same body positioning in this one from when I was just a baby.

I don't pretend to think there's anything I did to earn the chance to have my dad look at me like this.  It came from him, not from me.  I know there are many people who go through life without ever having anyone look at them like this, so it feels profoundly irresponsible and insensitive to suggest that I've been dealt an unfair hand because I only got to experience the force of this love and understanding for 28 years before my dad passed away.

But this is the best way I can try to explain what Dad's death has meant to me:  The person who loved me and understood me like this is gone.  The love isn't gone, and it sustains me in his absence.  But right now, instead of the pervading force of that love and understanding, I feel the vacuum of the absence of its lived embodiment in the world.  I realize that this particular type of loss is a very fortunate one to feel in the wake of someone's death... but even so, it's difficult to breathe inside a vacuum, in the absence of the one who best understood.

(Touching Feeling is the last book Eve Sedgwick published before she died of cancer, also at age 58.  I think the title and the biographic info make it work for this post, but it also makes sense because it thinks about literature by using affect theory.  Affect theory examines how we give physical, bodily expression to emotions.  Of the nine Silvan Tomkins identified, there are only two positive affects-- joy manifests itself via smiling, and interest manifests itself via lowered eyebrows and eyes that are looking.)