No Headstone

My father’s grave does not have a headstone. One might believe this is because we were too poor to purchase one or too heartbroken to consider carving such finality into granite. One might believe this is because he was not loved.

Perhaps one would think it’s because none of his children wanted to remember him.

All of these reasons might explain why he lies in an unmarked grave.

None are true.

We are not too poor.

He was not unloved.

There was sadness when he died, yes, but there was more relief in that finality.

And though it might be easier, his children do not want to forget him.

I remember. Every day, I remember. For I am one of these: my father’s children.

When I look at my soul, and see the black stains in it, I wonder if perhaps they are not stains so much as the shadows of him.

For as surely as I am alive and he is dead, his ghost would be one crafted of shadows. He would be that prickling at the back of your neck in the dark. That sensation of malevolent eyes on the knobs of your spine. He would not be the whisper of wind but the howl through barren trees.

Such is the way his memory haunts me.

I do not want to forget him, because without him, I would not be me.

I have found I like the shadows he left.

And how the shadows do distort.

How large a shadow can be cast by a man so small.

He was not small, not really– not in body. Only in mind.

And even this is a falsehood.

He was, in truth, a disturbingly brilliant man, warped and twisted by poverty and cruelty and liars who told him that because of his good looks and Christian values and dripping masculinity, he was better than others.

Better than everyone.

It was not so hard to believe, not for him.

I believed it, when I was a child.

When he was impossibly tall and strong and wise.

I especially believed it when he was kind.

When I remember my father, it is most often to remember his cruelty: his shadows.

It is easy to remember his hands.

The way they’d curl at his sides.

How they would stop just short of making a complete fist, but his knuckles would whiten as if they were clenched nonetheless.

It is easy to remember the flat of his thick palm striking my round cheek.

Not a slap.

His hands were too muscular for such a thing.

When his hand struck you, it was a punch, no matter if his fist was open or shut.

It is easy to remember this: the way his callouses scraped like little razor blades on soft skin to punctuate the strike.

But then, much harder to remember, is the gentleness of those hands.

The way he kept his fingernails perfectly manicured.

How delicately he would pluck just one cashew from the tin aside his favorite sitting chair.

When his hands signed my birthday cards, he always wrote the word Love in cursive, with a fat loop at the top of the L.

I remember well.

I remember that the only words in that loopy cursive scrawl among the many he wrote on my cards were my name, his name, and love.

It is harder to look at the dapples of sunlight breaking through the dark branches than it is to dwell in the shadows of him.

I cannot hate the man who made me climb mountains and then told me how proud he was as we stood at the summit, somehow larger than the behemoth hump of earth below our feet as we gazed into endless miles of forest—so impossibly big and small all at once. And then we’d sit, and he’d brush my sweaty hair back from my forehead and reach into his pack to produce a Snickers bar for us to share there at the top of the world.

How do I hate the man who taught me to ride a bike? Or who told the most miraculous stories as I sat on his lap. Or lifted me on his shoulder so I could peer into bird’s nests and behold blue robin eggs gleaming like opals amongst the twigs.

How could I hate the man who climbed onto the roof every Christmas Eve, so I might believe it was Santa stomping about for another year longer?

I cannot.

So, why, then, have none of his five children, who all share similar memories, bothered to do the small honor of having a stone carved for his grave?

It is not because we hate him.

Or even because we didn’t love him enough.

I remember.

And perhaps the reason I have not gotten a stone carved for my father’s grave is because I covet the memory of him.

Or maybe it’s to punish him.

Or myself.

Because logically, all that good he did could not hold a candle to the inferno of damage he dealt.

Perhaps I feel that in honoring him, I am dishonoring myself.

Perhaps I feel that a man such as him should be forgotten.

But I don’t forget.

Perhaps, I feel that it should not be me—the child he loved and hated most fiercely of all.

He told me, often, that I was the best of his children.

I have not told my siblings this. Our relationships are spun so tightly within the web of father’s dark heart, I worry they might resent me if they knew the truth.

Though, I do believe he said similar to the others.

Maybe we all carry the same secret.

He was open about the fact that one of my brothers was his favorite. He made no qualms about it.

“Pearl, if a parent tries to tell you they don’t have a favorite child, they’re lying to you,” he’d say.

I was not his favorite. He told me as much. But I was the best of them.

The purest of heart.

The most obedient.

The gentlest.

He told me.

He and I often had conversations the others were not privy to.

He was honest with me in a way he was not with my siblings. He showed me the bare face of his monstrosity. He owned it. He acknowledged his hatefulness.

He was unafraid to reveal the bald truth of himself to me because he knew I was powerless to do anything about it.

In a way, I respected him more for it.

If you’re going to be a monster, may as well be honest about it.

He told me, he was the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But this truth also set me apart from my brothers and sister.

I’d always known what they were learning.

I’d always known that the evil in him outweighed the good–that he was past the point of earning absolution.

So perhaps, I feel it should not be me, who knew his truth so deeply. Who was not conflicted the way the others seemed to be.

It should not be me.

It should be one of the others who loved him well.

I did not even go to his funeral.

If I had, I would have made sure there was a stone.

But now the time has passed, and maybe it is just my fanciful heart speaking, but there is something poetic about that lack of stone.

These are the reasons I play at in my mind.

Reasons that might explain why my siblings and uncles and aunts and cousins haven’t managed to mark his grave properly, either…

But they are lies.

The reason I have not gotten a gravestone for my father is because I remember so much about what he was to me, but I do not remember what year he was born.

I have not had a stone carved because I am too ashamed to admit it to my siblings or my mother or my husband.

I have done the math, of course.

I am capable of research, of course.

I think I have it right, but I cannot ask them.

And, I do not want to relinquish this excuse.

I am ashamed.

And I think that’s how he’d want me to feel.

My father’s grave does not have a headstone.

Perhaps I will be brave enough to carve one next year.