Void

Every Jewish New Year, my therapist gives me a list of questions for reflection. This year, I chose to write about a fear that’s been interfering with my life and how I might let it go.

I have been on this planet for 29 years and some part of my animal body still believes that I might get snatched by the ankle and dragged under the bed if I get up to pee at night.

Fear is a mechanism of self-preservation, a warning of danger. Just as my foot would recoil from the claw of an otherworldly monster, so my ego, a living being in its own right, instinctively protects itself from damage and pain. Lately, the monster under my ego's bed is the shame of moral failure, which I picture less as a claw and more as a pinprick black hole between my heart and my stomach that threatens to suck away all of my confidence and self-worth.

I didn’t feel this way when I lived in New York. When I was depressed and struggling to get out of bed to go to work so I could barely make rent, I felt exempt. Certainly there was a pang of guilt if I failed to send my mom a birthday gift, but there were no hard feelings. I barely had my own life together and any leftover love I could spread around was a bonus.

Now I have a house and a stock portfolio and to whom much is given, much is expected. Inheriting my dad's assets felt like inheriting his roles and responsibilities in the family. I saw him as the calm eye at the center of a hurricane of grievances and grudges that the rest of the family held against each other, a massive star holding otherwise wild planets in a steady orbit.

Fear is a mechanism of self-preservation and I’m afraid that I will fail to fill the space my father left and of what that failure might mean about me as a person: that I’m still too childish to make the kinds of sacrifices that come with wealth and power, that my mental illness was only a mask for my truly selfish nature, that I’m undeserving of all the good that’s come to me since he passed away.

This is the inflection point of the essay. This is the turning point where I’m struck by inspiration and the lesson becomes clear. At this point, between the griping and the clarity, is a tiny black hole. It contains my dad - every feeling, fact and memory I have, every shred of information about him. And I have to look into it, without being crushed.

Most of what I remember is unconditional love and I know I’m blessed because too many people don’t have that. I also remember stubbornness, aloofness and disappointment. Confusion and quiet judgment. And later the utter terror and helplessness in his eyes as cancer strangled him from the inside.

Just before I fall into the void, I remember what I came for: clarity. I understand that I’m not my father. I take after him in so many ways, but the space outside our overlap is full of countless other things that we'll never know about each other. If I gathered every person in the world who had ever worked on a design team with him or spoken to him in an Australian brew pub or rung up his groceries, that still wouldn’t be the whole of who he was. No person can replace another and despite the ludicrous degree to which my life has, consciously and unconsciously, become a tribute to him, I remain stubbornly myself.

My sister, my mother, my grandmother, they each have their own tiny black hole, made of densely packed information that sometimes overlaps with or fleshes out mine. And if I try to fill that black hole, to replace the massive star that held everyone together, I’ll be ripped apart.

Black holes are a good thing; theoretically, there is one at the center of every galaxy. My dad has certainly gained gravity upon implosion, drawing my family closer together than we’ve ever been. As celestial bodies orbiting this shared void, we'll affect each other's gravity, falling into new systems, new norms and patterns of behavior with each other. When I pass close to the void, I'll peer over the event horizon for a little while, without fear of falling in.