Lonely Thoughts - July 20th, 2021
It’s like taking Damian Lillard off of the Blazers and saying, “Fear not! Now Anfernee Simons will have more room to operate!”
We have decided to establish a scholarship in my dad’s memory for OSU College of Education students. In lieu of flowers, please consider a gift to my dad’s scholarship fund. Gifts can be made to the OSU Foundation at osufoundation.org or mailed to OSU Foundation, 4238 SW Research Way, Corvallis, OR 97333. Please indicate that the gift is in memory of Mike O'Malley.
—
It is really difficult to write about loneliness when there are so many people in your life who you still love. But the feeling is the feeling, and the situation is the situation.
I was finally able to summon the testicular fortitude (his phrase, not mine) necessary to listen to the audio from an interview my dad did with a student a few years ago. The student, who he was very close with, is Isamar Chavez. And in the recording, Isamar asks my dad a series of questions about how and why his life unfolded the way that it did. It’s a spellbinding and shocking 17 minutes, and I’ll be returning to it frequently in the weeks, months, years, and decades ahead. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll quote my dad’s summary of his own life, as told to Isamar:
“I had no idea what I was doing, failed miserably, got some help, got into teaching, and teaching led me into success in other fields.”
For my dad, I know that the catalyzing phrase in this sentence was “failed miserably.” Slightly earlier in the conversation he said this:
“Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, used to tell people — when they quit their jobs or failed or whatever — that [those moments were] a good thing: They had to reconstruct the narrative of their lives.”
My dad often cited the Hegelian historical approach of “axial moments.” Basically, this approach holds that when we look at a history, we can look at particularly significant moments and events as pivotal in the course of that history. Thus, by examining those “axial moments” we can better understand what happened before them and what happened after them. (The birth of Christ is the most-used example.)
My dad believed we could apply the Hegelian historical approach to our own lives. Basically, he thought that there were moments of disruption in our lives, and carefully examining those moments was a key component in figuring out the direction of our own personal histories.
He also often warned me of the “Hegelian trap.” Namely, that if we believe that history — personal and/or political — is traceable to a set of “axial moments,” then we are liable to convince ourselves that whatever we are experiencing in any given moment that we feel is important will seem like an “axial moment.”
I have an easy, silly example for you: I fell into a “Hegelian trap” when I convinced myself that getting a B+ in my First-Year Philosophy class was an “axial moment” in my life. (Hopefully, this essay is not evidence of the too-highness of that B+.) Alternatively, my dad dying is, assuredly, an “axial moment;” a point at which things before it were different than things after it.
Up out of the rabbithole we go.
Every single relationship in my life was, to one extent or another, dependent on my relationship with my dad. Because at the end of the day, the end of the conversation, the end of the experience, I knew I could call my dad and understand things better. I knew that if there were intellectual needs I couldn’t meet in my personal or social life, I could just turn to my dad. I knew that whatever manic and maddening situation I was enduring academically or professionally, I could just call my dad and gain the necessary perspective. I’d probably get a few laughs in, as well, for good measure.
I think I can replace many of the laughs — I already feel like I’ve been able to. I turn to the most fun people I know, we talk about whatever we would talk about if my dad wasn’t dead (silly stories from our shared past, sports, whose turn it is to DJ or dance or buy food and drinks), and we giggle. Over the weekend, I found it quite doable. It was a tad guilt-inducing, but it was basically pretty warmth-giving — maybe I would be able to fill the Joy Void that I wrote about last week; maybe I would still be able to find light in any moment; maybe I would still be able to lead a life in which a laugh was always around the corner.
But being able to laugh with someone does not mean that you’re able to fully connect with them. There will always be a moment after the laughter where reflection sets in. And that is the void I don’t think I’ve quite stared down just yet.
That’s the stage of denial I’m at. Because I know it is the one that will be hardest to fill.
And so when my dad talked about Carl Jung’s idea of reconstructing “the narrative of [our] lives,” I have this moment where the tools seem accessible — where it seems like I’ll be able to reconstruct the experiences and the giggles and the jokes; I’ll be able to reconstruct a life that still does find joy. A lesser version of it, surely, but one that is formidable enough to hold the weight it needs to hold for each day, week, month, year, and decade to come.
But reconstructing the intellectual narrative of my life now seems quite a bit more difficult. And frankly, right now, it seems impossible. Maybe that’s why I’m avoiding books for the first time in my life. Because the only person I’ve ever felt fully in-sync with, fully deferential to, my greatest resource...is gone. And there’s no actual replacement for that: Joan Didion ain’t it, Aristotle ain’t it, James Baldwin ain’t it, Profit-Seeking-Self-Help-Book-Author-Number-547 ain’t it.
And my dad knew that he was irreplaceable for me our last couple years together.
Another thing my dad said in this 17-minute audio recording, when asked what he wants from students, is this:
“I want them to become autodidacts…I want them to become young intellectuals, I want them to be able to think about things perspectivally, I want them to develop a sense of empathy.”
He put the weight of that expectation on himself. And central to his philosophy of education was that he had to be an intellectual role model for his students. The indicative anecdote: When I was growing up, he would take me to the library as often as he could. And every time he took me, he’d get me a book to read and he’d get himself a book to read. He’d sit next to me every night reading. Even if I was just sitting there playing Backyard Baseball 2001 or something, he’d sit there quietly (well, his version of “quietly”) turning through pages. At some point, it felt like I didn’t have a choice — if I wanted to be like my dad, I had to constantly be living a life of the mind. And I wanted to be like my dad.
He did a version of that little library trick with every single student who ever came into his classroom. For them, it was a term or a year or a few years. For me, it was forever. It was all I knew. There was no before/after. There was no “axial moment” in which Mike O’Malley became part of my life. He was just there.
My dad was my library, my never-ending resource. As he took in and shared a seemingly infinite amount of information over the years, he graciously passed it on to anyone he came in contact with. And much of what I’m trying to do with this writing is pass on pieces of what he shared in an accessible way.
Maybe I took it for granted. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t think I did, but the fact that my best current primary source on my dad’s wisdom is a 17-minute recording from a former student might be some kind of indictment.
But who am I to say I should have been better? I never expected him to die at 63. And it wasn’t up to me that he did. His time was now. If it was 20 years from now, selfishly, it would still feel like absolute shit. There was never going to be enough — he was supposed to be infinite. And when something that was supposed to be infinite stops, no matter when, you feel cheated.
That brings me back to loneliness. It brings me back to this sense that the way I was least prepared was the way that his absence would be visible in every single person I was involved with prior to his death. I look at friends, at colleagues, at loved ones, at whoever, and I see the way that their shortcomings were overcome, for me, by my dad’s existence.
And my shortcomings as a communicator, my failures as an autodidact, my destructive relational tendencies, were all papered over by his omnipresence. I guess his death is supposed to let me fill in those gaps myself. But right now, it feels like the gaps just grow larger. It’s like taking Damian Lillard off of the Blazers and saying, “Fear not! Now Anfernee Simons will have more room to operate!”
And more room to show all of his shortcomings. (Damn, I must be really low right now. Comparing myself to Anfernee Simons? Brutal. For non-basketball fans: Damian Lillard is amazing and Anfernee Simons sucks.)
The cliche, and thus clarifying, thing to say here: My social and professional existence depended on a prime mover. And that prime mover is now gone.
“Carl Jung...used to tell people — when they quit their jobs or failed or whatever — that [those moments were] a good thing: They had to reconstruct the narrative of their lives.”
My dad used to also talk about the failures of what’s called the Progressive (or Whig) Theory of History. Basically, the Progressive Theory of History holds that (you guessed it!) things constantly get better. Put another way, we can take Barack Obama’s favorite cherry-picked Martin Luther King Jr. quotation: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Eternal skeptic that my dad was, his citation of Jung becomes a bit more complicated without a comfortable deployment of the Progressive Theory of History. Because the connotation of my dad’s use of Jung was that it was always good that people had to “reconstruct the narrative of their lives.”
So, Dad, maybe if you were alive, I’d turn it back to you: “What if my life shouldn’t have been reconstructed?”
To this, he’d probably tell this downer of a story:
The father of a good friend of my dad died when my dad’s friend was 13 years old. (My dad would note here that the previous sentence is a mess. I still trust that you, reader, got it. And it’s sort of funny to leave it the way it is.) When my dad was talking to this friend in their later years, this friend said something to the effect of, “Ultimately, Spoon [my dad’s nickname], it was emancipatory that my father died. I had to be my own man.”
I remember my dad telling me this story three times. You think he was trying to tell me something?
“I want them to become autodidacts…I want them to become young intellectuals, I want them to be able to think about things perspectivally, I want them to develop a sense of empathy.”
Is this all part of that process? Is my searching for who I am in conversation with part of that process? Is it still my dad? Does it have to be a realigned tapestry of people I already know? New people? And if my father lives on in me, then why wouldn’t I just talk to myself all the time?
These are the questions that a deeply lonely person asks themself, aren’t they?
What does a lonely person reconstruct? A relationship with a myth? A projection of that previous relationship? A lesser structure, patched together with the materials he had left when everything came crashing down?
I’m not going to let this essay become another impossible, long series of questions. So I guess, publicly, I’ll stop here. And Father Matthias, if you’re reading this, I’ll be at Mass on Sunday to see if that helps any of the questions.
I think this essay got too theoretical. For those of you interested in observing grief, that’s probably interesting in some way I’ll figure out later. I’m told that honesty in all of these times is good. I’m not as certain of anything as those that tell me that, but this essay is more honest than some previous. It’s what’s on my mind.
In that 17-minute recording, my dad said that the best we can hope for is to find something that we carry a “rich ambivalence” about. Well, I’m richly ambivalent about these words. So maybe that’s the best I can hope for.
Until tomorrow.
Hegel, a measured suspicion of Whig history, and Backyard Baseball: three of my favorite things which I have yet to see discussed in one venue, 'til now. Your father was obviously a fascinating person and these essays have brought his vibrant spirit to the fore of what is being discussed; not engaging with him at OSU when I attended and had the chance will always be one of my biggest regrets.
The timing of this essay is interesting. I was speaking with my wife the night prior, still very much upset and trying to work through it. One of the things I shared with her is that this event, your Father’s passing, was going to be the catalyst to push me into the 3rd phase of my life, just as he did ~20 years ago, pushing me into my 2nd phase. Who knows if it’ll be proven true or simply pass, but it’s certainly guiding me now.