What We Find in the Quiet Moments
When I found out my father was dying, all the stories that had built up between us into walls crumbled away.
Love is the purest form of being human.
My sense of injustice for being treated differently from my brothers because I was a woman and my anger for never hearing the words I longed to hear from him faded. All that was left was love.
Love can erase your story and leave you bare.
I stared into my father’s face and saw all the stories he carried there. All the stories he’d take with him.
The birthmark on his cheek is the same one his mother had. The same one I have. The only thing connecting me to a grandmother I never knew. His nose bent to one side because he broke it in a fistfight on his first night in Toronto after he was mocked for being an immigrant. The scar on his chin is from where he was whipped by a Nazi soldier when he was a young child because he was hungry and reached for scraps of food left on the ground.
Love is all that’s left at the end of anger.
I sat in a darkening room and stared into my father’s face, knowing it would soon be gone, but all I could see was who he was before he became a face – before he became these stories.
I felt his spirit before it became a body, and it was beautiful. At the core of him was the vibration of his laughter. There was such lightness and celebration to it. I don’t know what happens when we die, but at that moment, feeling the essence of what my father is, I knew when it came my time to go, I’d be able to find him.
I whispered into his ear, “I will look for you.”
Love can tear you to pieces and put you back together.
It’s not that I forgave my father for any disappointments or slights against me. I saw him as more than his words, more than his actions. He was more than his story, and we were more than the shared story that bonds us.
Love is what death can’t steal from you.
I held his hand in the quiet of a darkening room, and we became our essence. We were in a place before our story, in our purest form. This is what I call love.
My father is the keeper of stories I long to hear—stories he loved to tell. These stories built up a life he fought hard to create. Through Creative Experiencing, I can access these stories even after he’s gone and hear my father’s laughter.
What stories are you the keeper of? Please join our community to follow my series on Creative Experiencing here: