That's right. Like a delicate plant, I am finally finding the light. Why has it taken so long? A good question. One best answered by reading the rejection letters I collected over the years, like this one:
But now, I am honoured to be one of 12 finalists in the Writers' Union Emerging Writers Prose Competition for my memoir “There's a Short Story About My Father I'm Planning to Write.” Some of the readers' comments: “A beautifully told story full of gorgeous imagery. As a reader, I felt that I was on a journey of discovery. The author's exploration of his love for his father despite the revelations that occur after his father's death are honest and heartfelt.” “A tremendous essay that works through grief in an elegant and emotionally resonant way, delivering a full picture of a father.” “This brilliant memoir reads like autofiction while playing with elements of metafiction.” “From first to last, this story sings to a reader.” “The language demonstrates the author’s command of their craft, with beautiful fluency at the sentence level and expert use of technique throughout."
The story which I may or may not have already written/may never get to write begins like this, describing events which took place over 30 years ago in Scotland;
My father is dead. I have him on my shoulders. Like so many men since the beginning of time, I have my dead father on my shoulders. I'm carrying him through a shadowed forest, because he has lost his way at the end of his life, and I must help him find it. He is exhausted, bewildered, wondering how he has strayed so far from the path. He is grateful I've come; he's been waiting for a quarter of a century. I help him to his feet, his legs buckle; I steady him for one last journey back to more familiar places where he can finally rest. I heave him onto my back.
There’s a short story about my father I’m planning to write, and in this story, set in the beginning of the last of the good days before his death, he and I are driving to Edinburgh, the city I’ve come back to after twenty years to help him reach his end. This is not the official plan as far as he is concerned, because at the moment he is counting on another few years, and I am just here to help him get back on his feet after surgery. That’s his story. In the story I’m planning, which I will never be able to tell him, we would be driving back to Edinburgh from Dunbar, a small seaside town about 50 miles from Edinburgh if you hug the coast east along the the Firth of Forth In the way of these sorts of stories, this will be the place that the epiphany takes place, there will be redemption, everything will coalesce, become crystalline, perfect. I will write a story about the past, youth, lost vigour, the end of strength, and the story will have as its theme the problem of closure, and how it must always be infinitely postponed, always receding into the distance like a road in an endless desert.
It's a companion to another piece of self/life/writing called "My Mother's Haunting," a prose poem that you can find in my collection All the Broken Things (Anvil Press, 2021). They both deal with a mundane but nevertheless shocking secret my father tried to keep from me until his death, knowing that it would be revealed a few hours after he stopped breathing.
And it was. The solicitor who came to read the will no longer had his client's trust to be betrayed. That confidence had left the house with the stretchered body of my father. I watched as the undertakers manoeuvred my father's body down the stairs strapped to a stretcher, standing it on end to negotiate the corner. It was like a morbid echo of the final scene in the Jimmy Cagney movie The Public Enemy. ("So that's how they do it," I thought.) And both memoirs are eulogies of a sort.
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