It’s Time To Look Forward
It has been almost 10 years since my son Paul passed away in Bangkok on March 16, 2012. I could be kidding myself when I say that I have thought about him every day since then. Why not? Nobody else is going to remember his short life apart from me and his immediate family.
There have been many nights of lucid and vivid dreams where Paul re-appeared, sometimes alive and well. These dreams sometimes fooled me into a false sense of security only to be reminded of the harsh finality when I came out of my REM sleep and back into a milder level of sleep and finally being awake and fully conscious of the reality of the present.
Why is this coming up this morning?
Well, as I said, it has been almost 10 years and apart from anything else September 19 would have marked Paul’s 42nd birthday. But the real reason is that I have finally started opening the boxes that came back from Bangkok just short of a decade ago. The boxes that were packed in his apartment in Suanplu (in Bangkok) and sent back to Australia after his death.
They have been sitting hidden away, taped up for all of that time. I finally felt a need to slice the dried up tape with a box cutter and confront the contents.
Drums, music CDs, books, cords, kitchen utensils, bits of paper and mementos, bills, receipts, artefacts, bedding …. it is all there in those boxes that have been stored away for well over 3000 days.
Yes, it has been hard confronting the memories that go with these items.
This may have precipitated the fact that I awoke this morning sneezing and feeling like I am on the cusp of coming down with a cold, emotionally vulnerable and knocked around by memories and regrets.
After the boxes made their journey from Bangkok I had them stored in a shed in the depths of the Dandenong Ranges before moving them to a room in our main garage where they have sat waiting to be confronted. The contents are simply physical objects, but they are the physical objects that belonged to Paul. Melanie has already gone through the possessions that he left behind in Australia when Paul went to Bangkok in the late 2000s. She has already experienced the grief and loss associated with the objects that defined the early life of her son. Now it is my turn.
It is OK to still feel loss and grief. It is still OK to not fully confront all of the potential that was lost. Who knows what his life might have turned out like. It may have been a disaster, he may have negotiated a new course in his life. Who knows!
There are many aspects of one’s life that cannot be shared with anybody else. In some ways these strands of experience, memories, regrets, failures, hopes and moments of pleasure are only relevant to myself and would be of no interest to others who were not part of my life back then or for that matter even those who were.
Unpacking these boxes is something that I had to begin and have to complete. The action is part of the passage of time that I have artificially held still. It’s not like having them sitting in the garage unopened was having any huge effect on my well being but at the same time breaking the seals and revealing the contents is something that had to happen.
I once had a discussion with Paul about the future. As hard as it was to conceive back then I pondered what our lives would be like when I was 70. That’s just 2 seasons away now. Spring and Summer is all that remain before that is a reality. Now I know the answer.
The memory of Paul will be part of my day to day existence until the day I die. In many ways being his father defined a good part of my life and threw up challenges that made me stronger but also potentially shone a spotlight on my weaknesses. It has taken me until about 2 years ago to recover from this volatile period.
Overall I‘m pretty certain that my relationship with Paul has helped me become a more compassionate, somewhat tolerant and caring person. That’s the way I see it anyway.
