Unfinished Business

Why is it, I wonder, that unfinished business holds such a powerful attraction for us? It sings a siren song, calling to us across the years and the distance that separates us from those people and places that haunt our dreams. No matter how much distance we put between ourselves and those things, they are but a moment away, as if all the dusty miles and dragging years are but an illusion of progress. Hard-wired memories, it is as if it all happened yesterday.

Some things are better left buried, but the dead always demand their due and, like a child's nightmare monster, refuse to be ignored. Time wounds all heels, no matter how much scar tissue you lay down, you just can't escape who you are. And, if you were going to be truly honest about it, would you even try? Better to be you than not be you.

There are some events that are so shattering you never truly recover from them. They ripple through the years like a stone dropped in a still pond, the echoes reverberating through time with a terrible clarity, a purity of essence that only magnifies as the days draw ever on. To grow from a boy to a man in the space of an hour is a burden almost too great to bear. Oh, that's hard, it is indeed.

So many memories, each as fresh and as powerful as the day they happened. My entire 8th Grade class came to my father's funeral, to bear witness, to draw what lesson each could from that event. It is bad enough to be the one chosen to find a dead parent, but only God could have a sense of humour sick enough to command a repeat performance ten years later. But in the end, what does it matter? Death is always with you, a constant companion silently waiting, one day the Sun will rise but you will not.

In the meantime, you live, for what else can you do? People come and people go, for that is what they do, bit actors who strut and fret their time upon the stage of your life and, their performance concluded, exit and fade into the mists of comforting memory. Or not so comforting for, while everything ends, they only rarely end the way we would prefer.

First loves are the best loves, for everything is new, waiting to be discovered, experienced as you will never experience it again. There is no doubt she saved me, kept me from falling into the abyss that beckoned so seductively, held at bay, for a time, the storms in the comforting haven of her arms. But first loves are idealized loves and memories, as strong and as immediate as they may feel, are often idealized, too. There were other loves to come, too, each as powerful and profound in their own right, so why should that one continue to echo through the years, to cruelly tease with what was and is no more? Having run its course, there still remains the nagging feeling of things left undone and unsaid.

Friends, too, grow old and fade away, replaced, if you're lucky, by new friends. And yet, there is always that one who somehow refuses to be shuffled off to the remote fondness of the past. He reminds you of his presence - or, rather, his lack of presence - in those quiet moments when the mind wanders from the immediacy of the now, a teasing will'o'wisp of memory dancing just beyond your grasp. He, too, calls to you from the mists and shadows of what was and what is done, a shade of someone you once couldn't imagine life without.

You don't talk about it much because, well, that's just the way it is, and you learn to live with it. But he, too, was there, one of the first on the terrible morning that set the course for the rest of your life. He stayed throughout the following weekend, splitting cheesecakes and whiling away the empty hours, never saying much because just what can a fourteen year old say when his friend's parent dies? But he was there, and he was there for all the horrible things that followed, and that was enough. I'd give my right arm to see him again, just one more time, to make all those yesterdays feel like today.

What price would you be willing to pay if redemption were offered to you? What would you do if offered time enough to correct just one mistake? Years later and you find yorself playing out the same sad, old story, standing there with a fireman as the paramedics work frantically in another room. You can see it in his eyes, the same thing you already know, the knowledge of loss and the need to say something, anything. And you suddenly feel the need to comfort him, the stranger, to tell him that everything will be all right, even though it won't. There is, in truth, no redemption to be had from the demons of our own guilt, and we all end as sympathy in a stranger's eyes.

Unfinished business, things left undone and unsaid. But we go on, free to make those same mistakes again or not as the vagaries of indifferent Fate move us. We're all prisoners of the choices we've made and the memories we've created and could you, would you, change them? Home is where the heart is, they say, and in truth, you've always been home, adrift on the raging seas of chaos and longing. But tomorrow will come, and with it, the promise to finish the unfinished.