Welcome to Hope Sparks. I write for people standing at thresholds—the uncomfortable edges where who you’ve been meets who you’re becoming. The places where you know something needs to shift, but you’re not quite ready to let go of what’s kept you safe.
Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. August 20, four in the afternoon.
I didn’t put it in the calendar. My body did. That’s how it works, and anyone who has lost someone knows the shape of it. You wake early for a week without knowing why, the dreams get vivid, you go tender in the grocery store, and then you look at the date and you understand.
I woke this morning from another dream about amputation. I’ve been having it a lot.
What I feel isn’t only grief for him. It’s grief for time. For all the versions of life that existed, for the people who once stood in the foreground and now live somewhere farther away. Old kitchens. Younger, wide-eyed children eager to play with me. A friend I spoke to every day and haven’t called in years. Former houses, former selves.
A life lived fully accumulates ghosts, and not only dead people. The ghosts of everything that was once ordinary and is now over.
They become our interior population.
For a while I’ve been carrying a question I assumed had an answer. How do you stay close to all the people who made you?
You can’t.
There aren’t enough hours and there isn’t enough proximity. Nearly fifty years in, I can see it plainly. Teachers, lovers, collaborators, the woman who ran the sweetie shop I visited almost daily, my dear dad. Each of them put something into me and then carried on with their own life, which means I’m partly built out of encounters that are over.
That’s the version the dream keeps insisting on. Something removed. A body that doesn’t get it back.
Sitting here in the dark, I don’t think that’s what it is.
They aren’t holes. They’re doors. I can’t walk back through and live there again, but I can visit, and I know exactly how to get in. Certain music. A smell that arrives before I can name it. Someone’s hand on my back. Four in the morning, which is probably why I’m awake.
The ache isn’t evidence of what I lost. It’s evidence of how much I loved.
Last night the four of us ate supper on the porch, plates heavy on our laps, bursting tomatoes and herbs from my weedy garden and sweet Quebec corn. One of those moments where time slows and you know while it’s happening that the memory is being cut deeper than usual. We got talking about what each of us does when we’re out of sorts. Alfie said that when the pressure comes he starts plotting. He makes a plan and moves, rather than letting it swallow him.
I do the same. So did my father.
Years ago he sat down and wrote a whole series about jumping. About the moment you know for certain you have to leave the life you were handed, and the long unglamorous business of working out how. He put it on the internet at a plain address, thejump.me, and called the whole thing Being Human.
It’s still up. Nobody took it down.
I’ve been sending that link for years. To clients in the middle of a career change. To someone leaving a marriage. To someone whose life got rearranged without their permission. I send it, and I don’t always tell them whose it is.
He jumped. Really jumped, more than once. That’s some of what he made in me, the ability to jump often and with a lot of love.
A door he left open, and I walk through it most weeks without noticing.
One day, long from now, perhaps I’ll be somebody’s interior population.
Late summer does this. It’s the real new year, whatever the calendar says. The light changes and something starts taking stock before we’ve agreed to it. After I wrote about Ma I took the pause I’d been describing, and this is what showed up in it.
So I’m not turning today into a project. The useful thing was already sitting there.
But I’ll ask you one question, if you’re carrying something similar.
Who am I missing?
Not why. Not what to do about it. Just who. Let the names come.
And then, before the day gets loud, go and open one of the doors. Play the song. Cook the thing. Read what they wrote. BE with them and you.
