I'm still making my way through Knausgård's Autumn. It's been a generative book for me, giving me so much to think about. I might share some of those thoughts here as I read.
I want to share one particular quote and what it makes me reflect on:
It feels like I have started something new, something quite different, and that is this family. I think of it every day, that what matters is now, that the years we are living through now are when everything important happens. My previous life seems more and more distant. I am no longer preoccupied with my own childhood. Not interested in my student years, my twenties. All that seems far, far away. And I can imagine how it will be when what is happening now is over, when the children have moved out, the thought that these were the important years, this is when I was alive. Why didn't I appreciate it while I had it? Because then, I sometimes think, I hadn't had it yet. Only what slips through one's fingers, only what is never expressed in words, has no thoughts, exists completely. That is the price of proximity: you don't see it. Don't know that it's there. Then it is over, then you see it.
It's hard to explain what it's like to not just lose one parent but both. When my mother was alive, she was a living thread connecting me to everything that came before. Now that my parents are gone—plural, parents, not just parent—there is an excruciating finality. A magnitude of loss that cannot be captured in language. Unfathomable absence.
The past is sealed away. Untouchable. Unrepeatable. And I do feel guilt that I did not appreciate or cherish every single moment of what I once had. I regret choices I made that cannot be reversed. That life with them feels far away. So does my childhood and my twenties. Maybe this happens as you get further into your thirties.
It's partly what Knausgård is describing: the end of his previous life and the beginning of another life with his partner and children. The years widen the gap between you and certain parts of your life that once felt vivid, intense, and endless. You start to forget things you never thought you'd forget.
I am twenty years removed from my father. The version of me he knew is not the version I am now. I'm forgetting things. Will I lose my parents twice? Will time take not just their bodies but also my memories and my sense of closeness with them? How do I prevent that? Can I?
I think I've written here about the way I conceptualize my life without my parents. I call my life with them my First Life. I call my time without them my Second Life. I can never return to the first life. It's unreachable. I must walk through the second life alone now, motherless and fatherless.
I am in the worst agony I've ever known. Yes, children lose their parents. Yes, mothers and fathers die every day. But it's different when it is your mother and your father. The fact that it is "natural" does not ease the suffering.
The fact that I had my mother twenty years longer than I had my father also does not ease the suffering. The fact that others have stood where I stand and have felt what I feel is another thing that does not ease the suffering.
This is my heartbreak. Only I can feel it. Only I can endure it.
Looking back, the years I had with them were "the important years." There is no alternate family for me, like there is for Knausgård. I have no man to look at me with love in his eyes. I have no children to snuggle with each night. I am alone. It is harrowing.
If the years with my parents were the important years—the years when I was truly alive—what are the years ahead? What am I to do with them?