Godt Nytt År

“I had a strong premonition that the big rollover was going to be an omen. An omen of how the rest of my life would turn out; how I would face the larger events. I wanted to do something grand—be in a club or bar or rave and shout the countdown with drunken comrades, usher in the new millennium with hooliganish ecstasy.

Instead my friends dropped out on me to watch ABC’s coverage of the ball dropping. I ended up at a friend’s house watching movies and having assorted shots of alcohol. As they began counting down, however, I realized how I could not damn myself to a future of watching other people have fun on television. I couldn’t understand how watching a massive celebration on television is better than being in that same massive celebration. Real time.

I left, out the front door at the stroke of midnight and began walking home, from Anaheim to Whittier. That's really far if you don't know. Both Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm are in Anaheim so as I walked the fireworks from their celebrations lit up the night sky. I passed a church where they were singing religious songs with rambunctious fervor. I passed a goat farm, probably the only goat farm in Anaheim, CA. My brother picked me up in Fullerton and took me home. At least I wasn’t watching tv.”
- In response to Hope, January 1 2000

A decade ago, amidst the euphoria of a new millennium, with all my hopes in the air, hopes which could only be disappointed in part, I began a lonely walk from Anaheim to Whittier. I wanted a televised event and what I got was the sound of my footsteps and the cars zooming past me as I walked toward my undersized apartment. I got my brother, who picked me up just shy of Malvern, who knew I would have spent the whole night walking without him to rescue me.

Last night just after midnight I repeated the process which is now ritual: a trip outside, thoughts of who I have become and what another year, or decade, has done to me. My trip, with the temperature submerged below freezing along a snow canvassed path, was necessarily short but the discomfort was so synchronous to the feelings in my heart that it seemed somehow orchestrated in the long span of things.

The discomfort was synchronous and warranted. What other feeling can accompany a year of so severe a loss? What can be thought in such circumstance? That God is with me, that He loves me, I am well aware but is He not also with me outside in that cold and darkness, as my fingers experience the sharp prickles of the weather through my gloves, as my breath is drawn in short, quick pulls and my nostrils, seemingly bewildered by the harsh winter air lose faculty and begin to secrete their contents?

My intuition all that time ago proved correct: the pattern I established for a new year, indeed a new millennium, would be a cyclical journey for each year’s end and beginning. What I couldn’t know that night ten years ago as I walked away from my friends in search of a higher ideal that I had so carefully crafted over the years, was that walking alone with broken daydreams was a foreshadowing a night a decade later when I’d walk alone with reality, not daydreams, broken around me.

One year ago I shared part of the night with my daughter. There was not a part of my future I could separate from her; she was the object of the hopes which I’d allowed to recede for myself. It was a real and direct transfer; there was nothing I could imagine for her that I wouldn’t obtain as much satisfaction (even less!) in wanting for myself. I had begun to realize parts of her being that I hadn’t preconceived, discoveries that I understand now are what make parents so proud and mystified by their children. She was beautiful beyond the subjectivity of my emotion as a father. Her feet were dainty miniatures of my own. As she found her voice, she would make her sounds to the delight of her mother and I; conversations of love on the living room floor.

Now that she is gone, the hope I’d transferred is still with her. I encounter it when I visit the cemetery, when I find myself looking at its evidence in the portrait etched on her stone. I can’t be there without encountering that feeling of loss in an acute, almost tactile sense. Sometimes it is in the silence. Sometimes it’s in the noise of crows I can see in my peripheral gaze. Sometimes it is in the sound of the wind. Sometimes it is in looking at my wife who returns the look with an understanding that neither of us put out in the open: we will spend the rest of our lives bereft because all we had is with our little girl, wherever and however she now exists.

My decade started after midnight, listening to my footfalls in a cathedral of quiet, freezing cold. Now I find myself anonymous, unknown more than a hundred miles away. If ever an epoch could begin from a sunken place, this is it. Although my intuition about the omen of beginnings is still with me, it can be said that I’m starting things with a heart that, although damaged, has not given up completely. I start with the love of my wife as we exchange places picking one another up in our journey together, tightly bound by our loss. It begins with the paradox of God’s love, which is still true even when life feels like the air outside in a Dakotan January. I cannot tell you how I know that, but I do. So firmly do I believe that I’m willing to stake the life, and death, of my daughter upon it.

Omaha, NE
January 1, 2010