Lines from a Maya Stein Ten Line Poem – the scatter’s flown and no one will ever really leave you
Maya Stein.com
I am a father failure. My child returned home amidst the pandemic palaver, fearful her elderly parents would run into Virus Street and die. Far away, in the confines of Denver, alone in her apartment, forced into the world of work-at-home, her anxiety rose until it felt insurmountable. We told her she could just as easily work from here and so she came back to the nest. For all my old man grumpiness, it was an amazing selfless and caring gesture. She chose to try and save us and thereby save herself.
She sat in a small bedroom untouched by human hands for fourteen days of self quarantine. She ate with us at the end of a long dining table more than six feet away and then back to her room. One week in, her company held a call-in meeting and laid people off, including her. She told us in tears at 8:00AM our time; 10:00AM in Denver. She had uprooted from here to move there for new opportunities and vistas a mere six months earlier. I broke protocol and held her as she cried, seven days still left in her isolation. It was time for a wallow. Not unexpected. She is a driven person, wanting success, tuned for it and now she felt the failure, despite the clear fact that 34 million other failures are out there. All this while the failure in chief takes NO responsibility for the nation’s devastation.
Her new role is to monitor my trips to the garbage can or whether I stand too close to the mow and blow guy. She polices our extravagant grocery shops ensuring I am hermetically sealed and touch nothing while roaming the aisles and checking out. If I say I am going to pick up dinner it creates emotional paroxysms. I try to reassure her I will ward off all attacks with masks and gloves and distance, but she worries without restraint.
Honey, I say, I am a grown-up. I know how to protect myself. What is the worst that can happen?
You will die and/or kill Mom in the process and I will be left alone. I will be left alone. I will be left alone; rings like the ultimate “bells that toll for thee”.
I am a father failure. My child requires my presence to feel my presence. She needs my tangibility to make me tangible – she cannot touch me without tactile contact. She cannot hear my voice in her head assuring her whatever distance separates us, miles or mourning, I am always present and love her without surcease.
I don’t know if there is a world in which reassurance can ease such panic, not brought on by real loss but by perceived loss. I try to say we have shared a full life, filled beyond measure and she has always been the greatest gift. I try to say, here or not, those connections never go away, they will sustain. But I wonder if that is a convenient lie. I remember my own parents sparingly. It requires a concentrated moment. It rarely arises randomly.
At death, whenever that may come, memories will be like Maya Stein’s line – scatters flown. She says no one ever leaves us, but in the end they do. They don’t desert us, but they are gone. I hope in that moment and all the vacant ones that that follow, my daughter will concentrate enough to recognize my forever love is ever present even in time’s vacuum, always left on deposit in her heart.