The Loneliest Man

This is a repost from a very old blog I had started back in 2005 when my father had a series of strokes.

He stood there for what seemed like forever. More probably, it was only five minutes that elapsed. But he stood there, letting the waves crash against his trunk of a body. His gaze fixed on the length of the beach, at no one in particular – as if the distance itself was his focus. He then moved further out. This time the waves hit him around the waist. Again, he just stood there, the palms of his hands just barely chopping against the water as the late afternoon waves pushed in. Again, he looked out at the horizon, up and down the length of the beach. After twenty or so minutes, he trudged back towards the sand and sat himself where it met the ocean. He would sit and let the foam of the surf dissipate around him. Then, he got up and repeated it. Out into the water he went. No swimming. No wave-jumping. Just silently wading. And then, he left – walking over to a crumpled up towel and bag, knocking his flip flops against the wall, and out of sight.

As I sat on the balcony watching this man as my wife read her book, I wondered what he was doing here all alone. He didn’t seem to be bothered by all of it, the loneliness. Perhaps, he wasn’t lonely at all. Perhaps, he was what I had claimed to be in college (when I was going through a major Morrissey phase) – alone, but not lonely.

Shortly after, my dad awoke from his nap and came out to share a beer and a smoke. I shared with him my observation of this man, whose image had stirred inside me so much emotion. My dad smiled and said that my head was thinking like that of a writer’s – that what I ought to do next is fill in the blanks. He then said that he had a similar experience a couple nights before my wife and I arrived.

“I sat out here with Mom and looked out into those waves, out along the stretch of sand,” he said to me in very tired Vietnamese. “And I got to thinking… and I said to Mom, ‘Look at all of this… the water… the sand. It’s been here forever and it took forever to make and it will stay like this forever… the water… the sand. But the people, these people who come… they are not forever. They will come and go.’”

He paused as he recalled his thoughts.

“You know it’s funny… one comes into this world and asks themselves at the beginning of life, ‘Why? What’s the point?’ and when you come to the end of it, you find yourself asking the same question.”

“You ask it throughout life, Dad.”

“Yes, that is so. But you never do find the answer, do you? All of these philosophers, all of these geniuses… we answer it with God, with happiness, but no one really knows.”

He paused again. This time I don’t know why. Perhaps, he was searching for the answer. Perhaps, he wasn’t. Perhaps, he was just frustrated with the idea of never knowing. Perhaps, he was hoping that hadn’t drank and smoked so much in his life, that the polyps on his liver proved no threat and that it all had been a serious misdiagnosis. Perhaps, he was trying to find a way to finally tell me this instead of mom doing it behind his back.

“You know, Dad… perhaps, it isn’t important to know why we live this life. You said it yourself, no one knows and no one tells us if they know. Perhaps, the more important thing to be asking is ‘How do you live your life?’”

And it was then that I had the urge to cry, to sob, to vomit all of the love and admiration I had for this man who was my father, who lost his country when he was my age and helped raise a family of artists. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. He wouldn’t want that. So instead, I asked him a question.

“Have you seen ‘Big Fish?’”

My dad looked at me as though I had cried, sobbed, vomited all of that love and admiration.

“‘Big Fish?’ I love that movie.”

“I cried so hard at that movie, Dad.”

“Me, too. I cried hard, too.”

And that was all that really needed to be said. Mom awoke from her nap and together, my wife and I drove the two of them down the beach to the end of it. For the past 24 hours, my mom had been nagging us to snap a photo of the two of them on the stone jetty at the end of the beach, past the pier. Though it remained unspoken, my mom really wanted this picture for posterity. Despite it being unspoken, this whole picture thing irked my dad so. But he did it anyways. And before leaving, a couple of strangers were kind enough to snap one of all of us.

I told him I loved him before he left and just before driving off, I heard him say it back to me, but with a swagger as though he was just ordering French fries.

As my wife and I walked back to the boardwalk, I felt it. The push of the waves, the length of the beach, the forever of it all.