Knowing
Hours after my father passed away, my mother gave me his watch. It’s a gold-colored Seiko I had bought for his birthday over thirty years prior. “He wanted you to have it,” she said. I stared at it. The face was slightly scratched, and it had stopped just minutes after he had passed.
I sat, holding that watch for what felt like the longest time. And as I stared at the watch face, I could see my father, not the bedridden, terminally ill man I had witnessed over the past two months, but a young, energetic man. A man I had never met until that moment. A man who expressed to me his own disbelief at being able to run again. And, in another flash, the same man, my very same father, sometimes dressing up, enjoying 1950s-style cocktail parties.
I let the images fade into memory, and into knowing.
How did I know these things? I have no clue. I can’t explain them.
But I can no longer pretend not to know, even without a dictionary term I can point to and confidently say, “Yeah, that one.”
In the years since, I’ve come to know my father better now than I did when he was alive. And by “know,” I mean understand him and the reasons he did things, not just the things he had done. Even the things I didn’t agree with. And in that understanding came a strange closeness I’d never experienced before.
It’s okay not to know the word for that kind of experience. Such words still escape me. Maybe some things are simply beyond words.
And not having a word for some of our lived experiences doesn’t make them any less real.
#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism
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