My parents have now been dead for over 30 years. About five years ago, I realized that I’d started to see them more as my ancestors than my parents. It’s begun to feel like my life with them happened a long time ago, to somebody else in another lifetime.

I maintain a large family tree database that goes back about 250 years, and my parent’s names now seem to sit quietly like all the other names and dates on the leaves in my tree. The personal bonds, the feeling of knowing them first-hand, the familiarity I once felt when I used to see them, it all seems to have withered away. The warmth I used to conjure up in my heart when thinking about them seems to have disappeared into the wind now too. It just feels like I’ve lost something special, that my blood connection or association to them has gradually faded. Maybe now they’re more like ghosts than ever before.

I never saw this coming. Worrying about preserving my memories was what originally motivated me to start writing about them back in 1995, not long after my mother passed away. At that time, I wondered if my family memories would fade away, and the stories I remembered would be lost. I knew those things had a shelf life, but still, I suppose that I always took my memories for granted.

It seems now like my stories are still tucked away in the folds of my brain, but perhaps my perspective on them, the glasses through which I review them, has changed as I’ve aged and grown farther away from the original events. Maybe emotional detachment is inevitable and just comes on with time. Maybe the pendulum on my folks has swung over from subjectivity to objectivity.

Sometimes, if I’m sharing memories about our parents or past family times with my sister, I get that old connected feeling back again. It feels comfortable. I think we’re probably as tight as a brother and sister can get, with everything that happened to us growing up. I only have her with me to remember our mother and father the way that we knew them, and I’m so grateful that talking to her helps me recapture my feelings of being my parents’ son again – the feeling of having a childhood and a family home. Even more, I’m grateful if talking to me helps her to reconcile her own side of our family traumas. Sharing is caring, as they say…. 

Another part of the parental remoteness I felt is the distance I experienced growing up: the long generational space that always existed between me and my parents. I had somewhat older parents than my peers. My Dad was 45 when I was born, and probably 15 or 20 years older than most my friend’s dads. As a kid, differences in age always felt very significant.

My Dad was born in 1921, over a hundred years ago. My Mum’s centennial birthday will come in 2031. They were both kids before World War II. Their world back then was all analog, rendered in radio waves and photographic film. Their telephone calls crackled and sounded shitty, people wrote letters not emails, and a loaf of bread cost about a dime. And I’m sure that everyone grew up smoking and drinking in their teens, because it was cool.

There’s a real psychological distance at work. Maybe as parents and kids, we never really knew each other as well as we could. My parents were adults, and I was raised to believe that they actually knew what they were doing, despite regular evidence to the contrary. I wouldn’t know much about their behaviour habits, their values or ways of thinking until they were already too far in the rearview mirror.

Lots of kids grow up thinking that their parents must have come from a whole different planet. We couldn’t know how much they were or weren’t in control of their lives. Maybe “family” was just a survival construct for adults who were hanging on and getting by in life.

In practical terms, the parent-child relationship has been lodged in my past for over half my life by now. So why did I miss them so much tonight that it came out in little convulsive sobs? Where does that new hurt come from?

I’d thought that the past had been compressed down inside all the little stories I’ve written, told, and sold to myself. Maybe I was just believing my own bullshit. It seems like real regret and loss can unfold old, seemingly-collapsed memories out into new equivalents of depth, like a kind of self-revealing reverse-origami. Maybe my flattened emotions and Cole’s Notes summaries of memories can be reconstituted like condensed orange juice, brought back into their full bitter flavour, with just the watering of a few tears. Add water and get stirred.