Preface to the "Rome Diary" Diaries

Volume one. Oct 1973 - Oct 1974

I can't put a date to when I lost my father; when he finally died this past fall I had been effectively fatherless for well over a decade already.  He spent the last few years of his life trapped like a caged animal in a series of institutional homes, mostly silent, pacing around, alternately charming and frightening his aids and fellow residents.  While he was living out this farce--and he of all people would have hated that sort of existence--as far as I was concerned, my father was gone.

I said goodbye to him one chilly April night in Northern Illinois. I was sitting a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, an experience I wrote about here on this site.  It was 10 long, cold, lonely days of self-confrontation.  Deprived of all comforts--adequate sleep and food and all social interaction I sat hour after hour, trying to watch my breath or monitor all bodily sensations without reacting to them.  At the end of the day, I'd sit on my bed and turn my headlamp to its red light setting.  This was a small luxury--it was about the closest I got to warmth until Day 10 (unless you count Day 6, when I made a minor jailbreak and took an illicit stroll down a country road on one of the first days of Spring).  A few days in, I reached a sort of breaking point.  I thought myself unable to continue, until a brief interchange with a compassionate volunteer staff person gave me the strength I needed.  I had a moment of catharsis standing in a grove of bare trees in the mud, tears running down my face.  It must have been that night or the next that I dreamt of my father, who hadn't been on my mind at all as far I can remember.  The dream is faded now; I'm not sure if I ever wrote it down, even pen and paper being on the list of forbidden items during Vipassana.  But I remember the important part.  My father was lying in a hospital bed, in a gown.  I was sitting by his side, holding his hand.  It was clear that he was dying, and I told him "I love you." I told him "goodbye." That was all.  He passed away quietly.  I awoke, and knew with perfect lucidity that my father was gone.  Not from the physical plane; but for me there was no longer any last trace of the man I was already struggling to remember.  He was gone.

It took some time, I suppose to integrate this dreamt insight into my conscious life.  Once it happened, it opened up a new possibility: that of recovering my father.  If I'd been deprived of an adult relationship with my father, now was the time to start getting to know him.  If he was really gone, if his story was over, it was time to start telling it.  And I was a lot more interested in the good parts than the tragic ending.     

Since his decline began before my adolescence, I had to delve a fair ways into the past to make much headway.  Reading his old diary from the two years he spent in Italy in the 70's had once felt like an illicit, guilty pleasure; now it felt almost like a duty.  The serious, articulate, adventurous, sharp-tongued thirty year old man in its pages was instantly sympathetic; I was both surprised and unsurprised to recognize so much of myself in him, or him in myself.

After my father actually died, another volume of his Rome diary appeared.  I guess my mother had known about it all along, but for me seeing it was like being given another piece of him.  I've been reading my way through it, and it's sparked some more dreams that feel like they're continuing the process of recovering my father and healing our relationship, abused as it was by the cruelty of disease and the callousness of teenage-dom.

I don't know how much is going to be forthcoming, but I've got at least one or two posts to come that will be centered around my father's journals and my own experience of reading them and getting to know him at my age.  Here we have it: the Rome Diary diaries.