If we were careful ...

I don’t think I am unique in this phenomenon. But I find that sometimes when you hear or read of someone else’s account of an experience that is similar to your own, you can almost unconsciously take their experience onboard as though it was true for you also in entirety. And without you even realising it you then slightly adapt your own particulars or emotional interpretations to fit – either because their story is stirring or their explanation of events and effects makes sense or their account provides a nice excuse for consequences or any one of a number of other reasons. Especially so when your own experience is long distant and blurred by the passing of time. So I am little wary of reading others’ stories of fatherlessness that I don’t just absorb whole renditions of life because in parts they accord with me or make some satisfying sense or validate some condition or are just plain moving.

All that said I started Our Father Who Wasn’t There, by David Carlin, the other night and lay on the couch, home alone, reaching for the tissues, as I read this (which I shall post here because it follows from what I wrote here and briefly here – it’s quite similar to the state CS Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy):

We were survivors and needed to band together, bearing our unspeakable loss. This I knew, although not consciously. My mother’s immense strength and practical, capable nature belied a fragility that we must not puncture. Inside her, as in a picture-book melodrama, were rivers of pain that could burst forth and drown us all. Inside her was the apocalypse, storms that would rip off sheets of corrugated iron, tremors that would tear away all solid earth and open the abyss. If we were careful to stay on high ground, where the grass was clipped and neat and the sun smiled, we would be okay. We would survive.