We Are the Light(29)

I was kind of amazed by Jill’s sudden about-face and started to worry that the great and powerful version of me that spoke at the meeting would not heed the call the next time I needed him to save me. Because the regular version of me was failing horribly here at the hospital.

“You were absolutely kingly tonight, Lucas,” Jill said, before adding, “Darce would be so proud.”

“Kingly?” I asked, ignoring the part about my wife, who obviously could speak for herself later that evening, if she wished to. “What do you even mean by that?”

“I don’t know. It was like you rode in on a horse to save the day. Like you had on shining armor. I guess I was just really proud to be there with you. Proud for you.”

“But the others. They couldn’t have been impressed with the way things ended.”

“You might be surprised, Lucas,” Jill said, which was when Isaiah and Bess arrived and insisted that we pray for Eli’s head and the project and everything else, and so we held hands and did exactly that.

Write me back and I’ll tell you the rest of the story.

How about it?

Karl, Karl, Karl.

I haven’t yet given up on my own personal Iron John.

Don’t worry, I’m very patient.

Your most loyal analysand,

Lucas





10.


Dear Karl,

All this time I’ve been spending with Eli has me thinking a lot about my father.

I know we talked about Dad from time to time during my analysis, but we mostly talked about my mother, didn’t we? You did—and I clearly remember this because of the impact it’s had—introduce me to the term “father hunger,” which resonated immediately with me, probably because I have always had tremendous father hunger. I’ve been thinking long and hard about what you once said about redeeming the father by healing the self and, therefore, breaking the cycle of pain, which men hand down generationally forever, until a son steps up and actively stops it.

I told you this was why Darce and I decided not to have children, why I got a vasectomy as a way to make sure that we never passed on the worst of what we had inherited.

You shook your head sadly and said that every man in my lineage—going all the way back to the first man who ever lived—was still inside me, trying to free himself from the ever-growing constellation of ancestral hurts. You said that when I healed any part of me, I was healing all of the many fathers and grandfathers who lived on deep inside of Lucas Goodgame. And that when I made love, they all too got to make love again. And when I had a healthy relationship with a son, my ancestors also got to experience that healing joy. And when I ultimately learned to love myself and begin to exist shame free, they also would finally become liberated from shame, at which point they could begin to help as healthy, cured, emancipated ancestors who—when necessary—would rally like a great army within me, lifting my potential and providing me with the hard-fought wisdom of a thousand lives.

Your speech made me sad at first, because I thought you were telling me that I had missed out on gifting my ancestors the ability to father a boy again and initiate him into manhood, but then you told me emancipating my forefathers was what I was doing every single time a young man walked into my office at the high school. You said I was helping the boys, yes, but I was also healing myself and therefore healing the men who came before me in my family tree—the many souls who were embedded in my DNA. I was their redeemer. Their renewed chance at wholeness.

And I began to keep all of that in mind during my work with students at Majestic High School. I took it very seriously. Treated my work as if it were a sacred mission. But I don’t think I fully understood what you were saying until Eli set up his orange tent in my backyard.

Darce’s parents were older and therefore a bit more settled and relaxed than mine were when she and I were growing up. And my in-laws both died when Darce and I were just in our mid-twenties. Her mother—who was a big smoker—went first. Massive stroke. Her father quickly followed via a coronary that Darcy used to say was literally a broken heart. It was nice to think of my father-in-law loving his wife so much that he couldn’t live without her, and that thought got Darce through the mourning period quicker than if she’d focused on the cruel realities of, say, her father’s taste for ice cream and red meat and fried foods and the resulting blocked arteries. I guess what I’m trying to get across here is… I don’t know. The thing that had always felt broken deep inside of me, well, I don’t think Darcy had that broken part or that broken thing.

There was this one story I never told you in analysis and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it just never came up, or maybe I’m only allowing myself to remember it now—perhaps because of all the time I’ve been spending with Eli—but I’d like to share it with you here, if that’s okay.

It happened during my freshman year of college. I’ve already told you many times that I was an awkward and maybe even strange young man. Because of this, I initially didn’t make many friends at the university. Everyone in my dorm was so outgoing and eager to be part of this massive wave that was pushing us all into the future. But I felt an awful longing to return to the past somehow. Maybe I felt like I hadn’t accomplished what I was supposed to accomplish in childhood.

I remember walking around the outside of my childhood home the morning my parents were going to drop me off at my new college. The car was packed. Mom was doing her makeup inside. Maybe my father was getting dressed. And I just couldn’t stop circling our small house. Round and round I went, dozens of times. Maybe even hundreds. I didn’t understand the compulsion until many years later, when I realized that I was moving in a counterclockwise circle. Now I think maybe I was literally trying to turn back time somehow, pushing an imaginary minute hand around the imaginary dial over and over in an attempt to buy another shot to get whatever it was I was supposed to have received during my formative years—exactly what I would spend the bulk of my adult years trying to give to the children of strangers.