I Miss My Parents

Last week I turned a new corner in the Village of Grief and found myself missing, at once, both my parents. Until then, I’d done my missing on a strictly individual basis, remembering each parent one at a time, as if seeking to grieve in safe, measured doses.

Then came Tuesday, when, for the first time, they popped into my brain as one solid unit. A two-headed unit, whom God, evidently, had joined just as tightly together as the couple in American Gothic. Only, unlike the Goths, my parents didn’t look as if they wanted to stab themselves with a pitchfork nor did they look at all old and grim. Au contraire, they appeared to be in their still hopeful thirties, bright-eyed and smiling, easy with mirth. That’s how I knew I was no longer missing two separate people, but what those two people combined had produced: Me, of course, but also themselves as the indivisible duo known to us all as mommyanddaddy.

I lay on my couch, longing to hear their young, gentle voices, to touch their smooth, warm faces again. What I yearned for most was to pretend I’d fallen asleep on the first couch I knew, so Daddy would carry me upstairs to bed, with Mommy walking softly behind. Knowing for sure, for absolute metaphysical sure, that these things would never happen again made me weep like a four year old child. When I actually was that four year old child, I’d watch out the window every time they drove away down the street and pray to God they’d come back again. Their not coming back was a terrifying, almost impermissible thought. So it felt then and so it felt Tuesday night.

I miss my parents. I miss having parents. I miss knowing exactly where I can find them, knowing which chair they have chosen to sit in. I don’t just miss them, I specifically lack them, in the way I think I’d feel the lack of an arm, with the same palpable pain they call (what else?) “phantom.”

Naturally, I told Dr. Mars that my sneaky grief had once more switched tactics. I also asked if he thought I’d continue to miss my parents as mommyanddaddy or go back to missing them one at a time. All he could say was that parents who have lived long lives and died natural deaths (i.e., parents not tragically cut down in their prime) eventually became, in the orphan’s brain, not unlike historical figures.

“Like Abraham Lincoln? Maybe Rasputin?”

I was picturing a gallery lined with portraits of the historically famous. Then I realized they’d only be famous to me.

“You’ll still miss them, just not as sharply,” he offered.

He might be right. Then again, even a smart shrink cannot know everything.