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 after decades working as a physician scientist and health sciences administrator. He has recently placed pieces in The Write Launch, Windmill, Free Spirit Publishing, 1922 Revival/VOICES, Streetlight Magazine, the Awakenings Review, Manifest Station, Qu Literary Magazine, San Antonio Review and others. Dave grew up on the North Shore of Long Island where he spent summers sailing on Long Island Sound. He lives with his wife of almost fifty years in Asheville, NC. Kathleen is a former ophthalmologist and now a full-time artist.