Puzzle Pieces of You
Life after death
9/25/2014
They say that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Well, just as well, I believe that Afterlife is in the eyes of the living.
In this way, we all get ten, fifteen, fifty, maybe even five hundred afterlives from the people we connect with in this life. Each incarnation is just as unique and subjective as our own minds, and not a single one progresses in the same way. In our afterlives, we are boiled down to our essence, our quirks, our touch, our idiosyncratic food choices, our most embarrassing moments. The real stuff.
I am still in the process of shaping my father’s Afterlife. There is a different one for my mother, my brother, my sisters, and for me. We all know a certain set of truths; he had a crooked smile from a broken jaw wired shut for six months, he was a short, lean five foot six, he began Army pilot training at age eighteen and from that point on was a man of the skies. These truths, big and small, are the easy pieces of the puzzle to fit together, the edges. No matter what order we find them in, we will always be able to place them in their spot, even if not always perfectly. They are the biographies of Afterlife.
We all hide things about my father from each other, both insignificant and Earth-shattering — I don’t believe mom that he had blonde hair — and accordingly we are all missing information from his life that we may never know existed, the torn and pet-ingested puzzle pieces only the maker would know about. Some of these secrets are parceled out to us throughout our own lives, pieces of the puzzle that fit together differently, depending on which ones we’ve already put together. Sometimes these pieces are revealed in the middle of a bright, beautiful day or on the drive to an end-of-program celebration surrounded by colleagues and close friends, and all of a sudden your world screeches to a halt, is turned on its head, and there’s nothing to do but sit, and digest, and wonder what else you have yet to find and what other pieces you had mistaken. These pieces, although the hardest to find, can set us in a frantic scurry to uncover the rest, to make the picture materialize again, bigger and with more resolution than on the cover of box.
The rest of the pieces, the subjective, the personal, the ideologies, the memories, are passed around the table, accumulating year-by-year, decade-by-decade to continue shaping my father’s afterlives. His brothers? They know his rebellious side and his mud pie days. His colleagues? They remember a sharp, determined lawyer who fought brilliantly alongside his wife, my mother, to defend their clients to the end. His father? Well, he has his own afterlives still walking this Earth in the hearts of his sons, save one. But that one missing afterlife, albeit missing many pieces from passing through generations, is alive in me and in my family, multiplied when we became my father’s family, even though we never knew his father.
Sometimes afterlives begin in this way, after the person has already left the world, in the eyes of a complete stranger. I’m still struggling to decide whether this is unfair, for someone with no relationship to or understanding of this person or their family to delve deep into the those other afterlives and come out, oftentimes, more versed than those meant to be closest in life. The investigator assigned to locate my father’s airplane is one of these people. Before I could even fathom what death meant, before I kicked my first soccer ball, before I learned subtraction, this man knew my family history, knew my father more concretely than I ever will, and felt a wrenching on his heart strings at the loss of this pilot, a stranger that he would never meet, before my family could grasp beyond the void he left as a father and a husband. The investigator’s professional approach to shaping this afterlife had him lamenting the irony of my father’s airplane crash as the attorney whose job it was to support and defend families left in our position, brought him face to face with the wreckage after months of searching, and tasked him with removing, recording, and photographing every remaining, bedraggled item in the two-seat plane. These are the pieces of the puzzle that don’t seem to fit anywhere, frustrating and daunting to place them, and perhaps in our best interests to have someone else take the lead on. With time, as they are revealed to us, they become easier to swallow. Eighteen years after the fact, I still have not been able to finish the investigator’s report. The bare bones afterlife I had shaped for my father — thought I had come to terms with — is just as real and alive today as he was.
We each leave behind a puzzle for the people in our lives when we leave this world. It is here that our afterlives grow just like we did, but grow out rather than up. Our afterlives can never be assembled in perfect mirror image of our Earthly lives, but why would we want it to be? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The beholder sees things we could never imagine ourselves as a result of their own experiences and the ever-accumulating pieces of the afterlives each person carries around with them. Every time one of our pieces is dropped, our afterlives gain a new outlook on our previous life, and we take the backseat in this new incarnation, sometimes being a backseat driver, sometimes just along for the ride.
