And when I say, “I don’t know how to feel. I don’t know what the truth is.”
Paradox says,
“Yes.”
And so it is settled.
_____
And Paradox says,
A message changes form each time it passes through another person, yet we cannot know ourselves fully without some willingness to hear the stories told from outside.
This is why I am particularly bothered by funerals. Even in gatherings built to remember, we can only share the heinously simplified versions of a person who can’t speak for themselves anymore. I encountered this at full volume when I officiated Papa’s funeral, after he had left sooner than he was able to tell me what he wanted me to say. But he told me he did want to talk about it.
He wanted a say-so.
I had to deliver to my family the version I knew at 12-years-old instead because I think some of my adult revision was in error.
I remembered this as I sat in the pew for the memorial of someone I had only met very briefly, where a pastor delivered a sermon of which the contents I did not leave with. He spoke with conviction. Face hardened. Practiced.
Persuasive, almost.
And I wondered if the dissonance provoked by his delivery is at all why Papa repeated that he did not want a pastor to speak at his service. Because as I listened to someone I did not know show his obvious skill in guiding a crowd toward how to think about a loss, I was still stricken with this personal pressure to step up there to hand the microphone to anyone and everyone else.
Why do you persist with answering questions I have not asked? And why, if you insist, must you do it with your brow furrowed? I asked the pastor silently, as I briefly forgot that this was a memorial.
_____
Dear reader I want you to become so free that you invent your own words.
Here is one of mine:
Social media.
Politics.
Academia.
Religion.
Narcissism.
They all, for better or for worse, operate by presenting you with thousands of newspaper clippings from their neck of the woods. They come to you with ideas from outside you built to guide your thinking.
I think that’s backwards.
I am as offended by someone suggesting I seek God as they would be if I tried to argue with them that God isn’t real.
I am in no position to know that. I am just a documentarian amongst salesmen; I have no answers for you.
But you do.
