Going Home 2

From The End of Time

Going Home 2

Because he was unable to get what he wanted in this life, my father frittered away his days in dreams of the next. The metaphor of this longing was the sea, limitless and unattainable. What my father desperately wanted – or so he believed -- was a world better than the one he had been given. This was the unrequited romance of his life, the object of the only prayers he ever allowed himself. But the world did not heed his prayers. It ignored him, as it does us all, and went its own way
In the end, my father’s disappointment was the gift he gave me, an irony that still links us beyond the grave. His melancholy taught me the lesson he was unable to learn himself. Don’t bury the life you have been given in this world in fantasies of the next; don’t betray yourself with impossible dreams
Are these judgments too harsh? Are they gripes of an ungrateful son? Perhaps the father I think I know was not so helpless after all; perhaps he was even shrewd. Maybe when he shared his thoughts with me on our neighborhood walk, he meant something else entirely. Maybe what he was saying to his son was this: Prepare now for the end