Where is God

 Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feelings of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.

  A lap in which to weep, but a huge a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace . . . To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can't remember, poignant things that don't exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don't know what future . . .

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 88

On my recent trip to Indiana I made my way out to Moores Hill to visit my mother's grave, as I do every time I make it back to that part of the universe. It was a weird visit because my father went with me (they were divorced something like twenty-five years before her death). I left him in the car and spent some quiet time with my mom, which ended up as a quite emotional experience. It was emotional in a good way because I was telling her that I just got married this summer and that I was happy, and that she didn't have to worry about me. After that I got back in the car and my dad almost immediately began to trash her, going over the same endless rehash of her alcoholism and how hard it was on him; this is very typical of him, and it's one of my regrets that I wasn't smarter or more emotionally advanced enough to see how he was separating us from her when we were growing up, which only made it worse, of course. It's all grown worse as he's passed into his MAGA phase, and, as people often point out, the cruelty is the point. In this instance he had the advantage of being old and increasingly infirm because I think if he were younger and more fit I would have pulled over the car and a row would have ensued (which is a rare for me; I think I've yelled at him exactly once in my entire life). Essentially, this was not the time to be trashing my mother. Of course, here's the thing: she wasn't really that supportive presence that Pessoa describes above. She was, as I said when I spoke at her funeral, "complicated." As I've often joked (or, well, not really joked), if I had grown up with my friend Dave's mom I'd be a much saner person. So, what I think I miss is the dream of a mother. It makes perfect sense that I've found such happiness in the cabin here in the woods with a loving, supportive, nurturing woman (an almost Freudian/Campbellian womb).