The Ghosts We Carry
The priest who performed our wedding sensed lingering depression. He dug (more than he needed to; not sure if he thought he was going to win over a convert… which I could have told him from the start wasn’t going to happen), trying to find patterns where there were none. My depression, such as it was, traced back to one source: the relationship with my father.
It was episodic, situational, and not a pattern requiring treatment but rather a natural response to specific circumstances.
My father—the one who took a four-year-old to see Star Wars, who played games and created safety—vanished long ago. In his place stood someone unrecognizable—someone who would send letters announcing new children as if writing to distant acquaintances.
“Can you bury him? Can you mourn him?” the priest asked (clearly looking for something to grasp; you can tell I wasn’t impressed with him), and that brought tears. However, it was the wrong question. How do you mourn someone still living? (I shudder to think what being a parishoner of his would have been like.) This isn’t a case of burying the past—the past is what makes us who we are. It was a poor approach for the priest to take.
I had learned about my father’s new family: a stepmother not much older than me, half-brother about to become a big brother himself. According to relatives at that time, my father was happy. I may disagree with that statement in retrospect, but I’ll keep that for later.
The rage should come when the priest asked his question. Here’s someone who walked away, who left a void, now playing father to a new family. Giving them what he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give before. But rage doesn’t come. Just tired acceptance.
This isn’t Star Wars—there’s no sensing good still remaining, no dramatic redemption arc. This is real life, where people change, make incomprehensible choices, build walls that can’t be breached. Rage is useless in a case like that.
My teenage relationship with my father was contentious. Either pushing to exhaustion for approval or deliberately failing for attention. Classic patterns—probably echoing his own parental relationships—and generational trauma passed down like an heirloom.
So what to do? The priest got me to cry (I’m sure he thought he had a breakthrough; I’m also sure he was a tool), but there was little behind those tears apart from nostalgia. What you do is accept him for who he is, accept that differences will always exist, and be willing to work with the reality that this is now an adult relationship, fundamentally different from what came before.
Healing doesn’t always mean redemption or even reconciliation—sometimes it means accepting loss and moving forward. Other times it means celebrating four-year-old memories while releasing the need for more.
The priest kept talking about treatment plans and pathology. But this isn’t depression as disease—it’s grief as appropriate response. It’s the natural result of loving someone who couldn’t love back in the needed way. Once the wedding was over (during which he kept screwing up my name), my wife and I quickly set the priest aside.
Sometimes that sign of depression isn’t depression, it is just what it feels like to be human in a complicated world. The work isn’t curing it but integrating it—not “fixing” something but embracing it. Carrying ghosts without letting them carry you.
This is an expanded and revised version of posts originally published on July 16 and August 13, 2001.