On December 21, 2019, I watched my father die. He was sixty-two. Just a few weeks ago, my four-year-old daughter called me an old man because I’m thirty now and, to her, that seems ancient. I thought the same of my dad when I was her age, but as adult, I know better. Sixty-two isn’t young to a child, but it’s far too damn young to die. At his time of death, I was twenty-five, an adult, sure, but an inexperienced one who still called his dad for advice a couple times a week, and one who had his own child on the way and was scared to death about becoming a dad. At the time I felt I needed him the most, his body failed him. A section of his intestine, which was already several feet shorter than the average person’s thanks to a ruptured colon and subsequent resection a decade prior, had essentially folded in on itself, cutting off blood flow and leading to what is known as “intestinal death,” something that wasn’t caught until he was well past saving.
The most poignant image in my head of that day is of his strained gasping for breath after the machines were unhooked. The way his chest heaved, struggling to the very end, still plays on a loop in my mind’s eye. I’d seen the dead before, at the unsettling open casket funerals of ancient relatives I’d met maybe once or twice, but this was my first time seeing death. Nothing can change your perception of life faster than watching someone lose theirs.
Once you’ve seen someone die, especially someone you love, there’s no unseeing what you’ve seen, no rolling back the clock to live a few more moments with those last shreds of innocence. Innocence, like so many other things, it often talked about as if it is a monolith; once you lose your innocence, you lose it all at once. But if you’ve stood bedside as someone draws their final breath, you understand that “innocence” like “intelligence” is multifaceted. One can lose innocence in the way every moderately creepy youth pastor warns their teenage congregates, or have the rose-tinted glasses of childhood ripped off by the cruel realities of the world, but the final innocence, the one that changes you most, is the one lost when you witness the moment a person’s body becomes an empty vessel.
Innocence protects us; it is an epidermis, shielding our sensitive nerves from pain. Upon seeing death, that skin sloughs off all at once, a full-body degloving, and even the pressure of the air around you becomes too much to bear, a searing pain that never quite stops, ebbing for a time, then flooding back. If you’ve never experienced it, imagine the burning irritation of a peeling cuticle, but covering the entire surface of your body.
So the question is: how do you heal the total loss of innocence? What salve can you apply? What pharmacy carries the right creams, what apothecary brews the best tinctures and elixirs to regrow the skin and cover the exposed nerves again? All those that advertise a cure are of course selling nothing but snake oil. The answer to the question is the most obvious, and sadly most boring one. You wait. How long? I don’t know. Keep waiting and find out. But the skin does grow back, just not the same as it was. It returns as a callus, engulfing body and soul, hard and thick, so that no sensation, pleasant or painful, can pass through. It is an instinctual defense against the agony of loss, with the unfortunate side effect of disconnecting you not only from pain, but from the love of the ones who love you.
Less than a month after my father died, Gigi, my grandmother and last surviving grandparent, passed as well. I didn’t cry. There was no mourning period, as there had been for dad. Hell, I was far from finished mourning him, how could my heart possibly hold more sorrow than it already held? When I think back on Gigi’s passing, I feel a pang of guilt for not having mourned her loss properly. It wasn’t that I hadn’t loved her, but by that time, my calluses had already formed, and nothing could reach me within my shell. Perhaps, at that moment, the calluses were a blessing, holding together my shattered pieces and preventing them from breaking further.
But that blessing was in equal measure a curse. Forty-six days after my father died, I became one myself. A few minutes after noon, my daughter took her first breath. For a moment, there was immense joy, a warmth that penetrated my callused soul and left me elated. Unfortunately, that joy had left an opening, a path for pain to seep in and taint a moment that should be pure and wholesome. My first thought upon seeing her face was of how perfect she was. My second was of how dad would never get to see her.
I’d like to say that the love I had for my newborn daughter was the balm that smoothed the calluses and opened me to the world again, but anyone who has endured the stress and sleep deprivation that accompanies a newborn will tell you that whatever anxieties you held before your child’s birth are magnified tenfold when they finally arrive. I wasn’t patient enough. I frequently snapped at those around me. And when March of 2020 arrived, so too did the threat of deadly viruses and a total shutdown of our way of life. If anyone has ever wondered how the mental health of a grieving son and new father would fare when locked in a house for months, I can assure you that the answer is “not well”.
Calluses do go away, provided you cease the activity that led to the callus in the first place. In the case of some calluses, like those of a guitarist or a long-time manual laborer, they go deep into the skin and may never fully fade. The callus that forms after you see someone die, thankfully, is of the first variety. However, consistent friction will prevent true healing. If you want to be rid of the callus, you have to let it rest.
It’s taken an agonizingly long time for me to return to some semblance of normalcy. The pain inflicted by a single moment continued for years, egged on by the consistent lack of consistency of the post-COVID world. There wasn’t some great breakthrough, a motion-picture moment where everything clicked and I emerged, a phoenix from the ashes of my depression. That kind of Hollywood bullshit still pisses me off. For me, to find a path forward I had to first relearn everything I thought I knew about myself. I went through some of the more popular methods, therapy, psychiatric visits, little round pills for this chemical deficiency or that. Perhaps the most important revelation from this period came in the form of a diagnosis of ADHD at the age of twenty-nine, and the subsequent medication that came with it. As it turns out, a key component of focusing on your own mental health is first having the ability to focus at all.
Since then, those calluses have faded at an exponentially increasing rate. My tone has softened. Bridges thought to have been burned have been mended, though for several the construction continues still. During this process I’ve found that learning to feel again isn’t like riding a bike, if you don’t use it, you forget what it’s like.
While sitting on the couch the other night, I looked to my wife and said, “I feel weird. It’s like…I’m beyond elated, especially when we’re together, and it’s completely overwhelming. I swear, something’s not right, like maybe I have a tumor pressing on my brain or something.” My wife, being my superior in wisdom and intellect, looked up from her book and said, “I don’t know, Matt. Have you considered that maybe you’re just happy?” How sad is it that it had been so long since I felt just happy, not happy tinged with sadness, or happy but skeptical, just happy, that I had entirely forgotten what it felt like. It’s astounding, really. I can’t remember the first time I felt happiness (who can?), but now I can definitively say I remember the moment I relearned what happiness feels like. Imagine that first gulp of ice-cold lemonade after a few hours of yard work out in the summer sun, the gulp that made you think “damn, I didn’t realize lemonade tasted this good!”
Even if the callus is gone, there is still scar tissue underneath. The impact of watching someone die isn’t something that ever leaves you. Once the mark is there, it stays with you every day, a constant reminder of what you can’t get back. That said, it isn’t all bad. After all, a scar is more than a reminder of the wound, it’s the evidence that you’ve healed.
