Fierce Attachment, Part I

 

Two days before my father died, I felt him leave. I had just spent a few hours at his bedside. He was at home. Eighty-five years old. Until a few months before, he had seemed young for his age. Then, suddenly, it all changed. On this evening, he had slipped out of a diamond-hard clarity that had been the treasure of his last week, into delirium. With his eyes closed, he swung his legs over the side of the bed as if to get up.

I stood in front of him. He leaned forward until his forehead was resting against my stomach.

“Where you goin’, Dad?”

“School,” he said softly.

“No, Dad. You don’t have to go to school. Let me help you.” I bent over and lifted his legs. He lay back down. I caressed his forehead. He fell into silence.

An hour later, I left to drive home alone in my truck—a fifteen minute drive. When I was halfway there, I felt him go. It was as if someone had grabbed the skin at the edge of my chin and ripped it all the way down my torso. Tears came on so quickly, I had to pull off the road. Mind you, there were years when there was so much anger between us, we did not speak. Our relationship was complex, like so many parent-child relationships. If you had asked me at thirty if I would cry over his death, I’d probably have sloughed it off in the negative. But now, I was fifty-five years old. We were lucky enough to have had the time to work it all out and rediscover each other as grown men. In those sobs, I felt the purest truth. My attachment to him was fierce, fiercer than I had ever allowed myself to feel. I would simply not be me without him. It hit me in a way I had never experienced. The knowledge was straight, undeniable, painful, yet rich. Those were beautiful tears. I would not trade them for anything. I thought at the time that I had never before allowed myself to feel the full magnitude and meaning of our bond…and that this is likely true of most people.

His body lingered another day and a-half. But he was not in it.

Nine years later now, I feel my father in my own gestures, see him in the mirror, sense his presence in the shape of my thoughts and passions, hear him in the tone of my voice, my inflections, the words I chose to speak and write.

What really distinguishes humans? Is it our capacity for language? Abstract thought? Mathematics, Art, Music? I would say no. While our experience and expression of those things are certainly wonderful and unique among all known creatures, what really marks us is how fiercely the need to attach drives everything about human life. It is our primary survival strategy. How else would a creature as fragile and vulnerable as the human baby survive into adulthood? We attach first to our caregivers, but ultimately, to things spread around the 360 degrees of our field of being. We attach to our homes and hometown, to favorite places and memories, even trees, rocks, rivers, shorelines, mountains, to colors, foods, times of day, to equations, paintings and songs, to product brands, to certain sports, teachers, doctors, heroes, even villains and torturers as well as political parties, to our armed forces, our nation and, occasionally, our planet, to our clothes, toys and tools (whether high or low tech), to money, power, drugs, ideas, careers, identities, beliefs, ways of doing things and to dreams. Some of us even develop a stubborn attachment to actively denying that we are, first and last, creatures of attachment all the way through our lives…to that last delirious moment when we think we have to get up and go to our school.

To acknowledge the fierceness of attachment manifest in our very genes and brought fully into relief in our individual lives and our cultures, is to have the courage to say, “Yes, I need. I need others. I cannot fully be me without you, Mom, without you, Dad, without you, my brother and sister, without you my wife, husband, child, without you, my dear friends, students and beloved mentors. I need other hearts within which to place my own…and that I may welcome into mine. To be human is to need the solace of touch, the comfort of companionship, the safety of love…and to grieve ferociously when one to whom I have been deeply bound, dies.”
C2011 Bob Kamm