The new year is my 63rd, and with age I have come to understand that no matter how hard I try to hold on to the past, the images fade and will, eventually, disappear.
When I was a boy my Belgian grandmother visited our home in Allendale, N.J., nearly every summer. She brought Belgian chocolates, her felt hat and thick-heeled shoes. We played cards, sang French songs and sat in the yard together. She came to my college graduation and later pushed my son in a carriage.
Thirty years ago my parents and I helped her into a wheelchair and kissed her goodbye at Newark airport. The thoughtful airline worker who took hold of the chair kindly turned it around and pulled my grandmother backward toward two wide doors. The doors opened automatically. My grandmother sat in the wheelchair with her felt hat and she waved goodbye. I never saw her again. Her worn heart gave out and she died that winter.
When my daughter Karen married a number of years ago, she and her husband decided that they wanted to move to Portland, Ore., and they were going to rent a U-Haul truck and drive across the country. As the day of their departure approached,I was excited for them: a grand trip across the United States, and when they pulled out of the driveway I ran to the street and waved and waved, watching the orange and white truck grow smaller and smaller. Just before the truck turned and disappeared, Karen stuck her hand out the window and waved goodbye.
CORBIS
That night I was so happy for her. Two days later I said to myself, “Karen was here just two days ago.” As the weeks progressed, I said to my wife, “Karen was here just a month ago.” It took time for me to realize that things would never be as they once were. Karen is living outside Portland with her husband. She is happy. She has found her way. I held her hand when she stepped into the ocean for the first time, when her mother took a photograph of us before her senior prom, and when I led her down the aisle on her wedding day. I will never forget her hand waving out the window of that U-Haul truck, a truck that just seemed, on its own, to turn and disappear.
One afternoon when I was a teenager, I was thumbing through a family album, and I came across a small photo of a dock at some old seaport town. My father walked into the living room, and he said, “Look closely. What do you see on the dock?”
I squinted a bit and said that I saw a man waving. “That is my father. He came to the pier in Belgium with your mother and me as we were leaving for America in 1948.” They were on the boat, waving goodbye.
I looked up at my father. He looked at me and said, “That was the last time I saw him.”
My father died two and a half years ago at age 100.
When my son was 8, he asked me if I knew anyone who was old and lived in Australia. I said no, and asked why he wanted to know. “Well, if we did, when that person dies he can tell us if there is a heaven.”
If you are an 8-year-old boy, you might think that Australia is already halfway to heaven, and you might want an explanation about what happens to us—all of us—when we disappear.
I agree with the artist Henri Matisse, who once said, later in life, “I’m growing old, I delight in the past.” My past is connected to wheelchairs, rented trucks and photographs in the family album, but the older I get, the harder they are to see. Perhaps I am already on my own journey to Australia.