My father died 17 years ago. I didn’t attend his funeral, which took place in my rather distant hometown, proceeding instead with my plan to defect to Europe, which ended up happening three days after his passing. I suppose this to be the reason why my father’s death remained an abstraction to me; much like the loss of a bishop in a game of chess, if, like me, you’re one of those ‘players’ who know the rules of the game, but can’t see very far in it at all. My father was suddenly gone, for good, but he had been missing quite a lot for quite a while anyway; which, incidentally, wasn’t entirely his fault.
A few years later, visiting my hometown for the first time since my arguably selfish choice to leave the country, I accompanied my mother to the local cemetery. There, in a tomb without names, lay both her parents and my father. I dutifully helped her clean the concrete, which had almost completely lost its white coat of paint, and plant a few roses we had brought. The slab covering the tomb was incredibly material; so material in fact that only the abstraction of death could pierce it and escape the mysterious vault underneath. In the end, I left the place with only an abstract sense of peace.
A few years later, my daughter was born. The birth of my son followed as well. And now my hair has become almost as white as my father’s was; so much so that my sudden reflection on glass surfaces on the streets has started spooking me with a flash of his physical memory. I also sometimes feel him trying to take over when I talk to my children; something I must be careful about. Long story short: death, abstract; memory, concrete.
Last Sunday — Mother’s Day — I called my mother. She was briefly visiting an aunt in my hometown, but she casually mentioned that she was also taking the opportunity to order the exhumation of my father’s remains. There seems to be a gentle push from the extended family to make space for other relatives, she explained. She also told me how her plan is to cremate the remains and then let my sister and myself decide what to do with the ashes. Everything is difficult on that tropical island, with all the bureaucracy and whatnot.
Since that phone call, a vivid, almost tangible image of dry bones recurrently enters my mind, as material a memento mori as can be mentally reproduced. And with it, my father’s death has started hurting, in the gut, for the first time in all these otherwise fruitful years. Ashes are just undifferentiated stardust, tabula rasa; bones, on the other hand, are the relics of the saint that he wasn’t, anti-hero perhaps. My father. His almost forgotten humanity now seems to radiate from the idea of those bones that I can suddenly feel in my own.
