A Father’s Lament
Not in your bed, not in the living room or backyard. Searching, searching for you.
For years though we wandered past each other, I didn’t know how or where to find you.
Your quirkiness forged a mélange of zesty flavors: a cream pie, blueberries sweet,
lingonberries sour, morsels of lime for tartness. A million versions of you.
A glimmer of Apollo when you spun the opening bars of Chaminade’s concertino on your flute,
then darkness when the scene snapped and your eyes moved on to that faraway place within you.
We watched you rescue friends from fentanyl and vodka, misreading the urgency
of your own torment, thinking you still had time to heal. Everyone rescued, but you.
A crescendo of disconnection grew between us. Why the knife at school? Clubbing?
Drugs? I could not find the path to your brain to assuage the demons destroying you.
Life became a collage of jarring scenes: a festive Christmas at home one year, rehab in a harsh Montana winter the next. Time and space melding into an uneasy pas de deux around you.
Your sudden exile from law school to our house in a city you did not know or love.
Dozens of unanswered texts and calls from friends trying to connect with you.
You were agitated, unsatisfied, unable to escape an inner pain—waxing, waning,
but never departing. This refuge became a labyrinth leading the Minotaur straight to you.
A paragon of reinvention and rebirth, you sampled so many lives, yet sensing the smallness
of your life on a god-like scale, you wrote, “All will be well. Days will pass for you.”
I found your lifeless body casually reclined in the morning sun. Seared into my gyri
and sulci, a tsunami beaching me to the end of time with this image of you.
Even eighteen years later, we are actors unable to grasp our cues, sentenced to wander
the lava fields without map or compass, weeping for what might have been with you.
The sound of a long flute meanders the shore. It is never too late, Dave. Until it is.
Until ashes spread over the clear waters of a lake. No second chances for you.
Dave Stern is new to the community of writers in the past two years after decades as a physician scientist and healthcare administrator. His career changed direction markedly due to the loss of his younger son Alan by his own hand in 2008, and its effect on him personally and his family. His writing also draws on his background as a sailor, clarinetist, research scientist and administrator (Dean, VP for Health Affairs) in academic medicine as well as an appropriately neurotic family that supports and terrorizes each other depending on the occasion. He has placed pieces in the Streetlight Literary Magazine, Qu Literary Magazine, the San Antonio Review. He has also published seven free-lance pieces in the Citizen Times of Asheville NC, where he now lives with his wife, a full-time artist, around the theme of what are the elements that makes Asheville a place that people want to visit.
Selections from his recent published works (poems, short stories, creative nonfiction, one newspaper piece) are indicated below with the links (as available):
One Hand in my pocket (short-story) – The Write Launch (published in 12/24)
Second chance (micro) – Beyond Words Magazine; Piece is on page 111 of the volume “Scars.” (published in 05/25)
Hurricane Helene (op-ed) – Citizen Times (Gannett publications – local newspaper for Asheville) (published in 11/24)
Opinion: How Tropical Storm Helene helped me connect to my adopted home of Asheville
Saved, Barely (micro) – 1922 Review/VOICES (published in 4/25)
Day of Firsts (creative nonfiction) - Streetlight Magazine (published in 03/25)
The Moment My Dad and I Traded Places - ManifestStation (published in 11/25)
The Unknowable (poem) - Thimble Literary Magazine (published in 12/25)
Doing the Doable (poem) - Harrow House Journal (published in issue 2, 12/25, pp 78-79)
Catch Him if You Can (short nonfiction) - Qu Literary Magazine (published in 1/26)
Coda (poem) - San Antonio Review (published in 10/25)