For Edward Lahey, my grandfather

If there is one regret I have, it is his absence from my life.

There is no beauty in the image of the starving artist, let me tell you. There is no elegance in the tragic life and death of an underappreciated poet, and those who go in search of some kind of meaning in that are fools who have never seen such a thing first-hand. These people who romanticize the idea of being a tortured creative genius have never felt the pain inflicted on the family of sad genius. But there is a kind of magnificence in the kind of artist who suffers as he had and still makes art of it.

I don’t intend to glamorize his life in any way, because it’s not my place to do so. I never knew him on a personal level, not in the same way my mother, my aunt, or even my sister knew him. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him, and while maybe some of that is based in the lack of opportunities I had to be with him, it’s mostly my fault. It’s mostly because I viewed him as being old, and frail, and a broken person who was not worth my time. I was in the pig-headedness of youth, and some strange person with whom I’d had little personal contact was the furthest of my interests. He wrote me letters, and to some I may or may not have responded, but the vast majority were read and put away.

In my defense, I kept every letter he wrote me, so maybe that counts for something. I’m not sure why I kept them; perhaps it was easier to keep them to throw them away, but I think it’s more likely that I kept them to have some proof that he was in my life. He was in my life, even if it was merely in words written on paper.

I do not remember the sound of his voice. I do not even remember just how tall he was, or when I saw him last. I don’t remember the last time I spoke to him. I remember only snippets of the times we visited him, and even these are too abstract to place chronologically- there was a carousel one time, there was a stream with a foot-bridge over it another. I only have a handful of gifts from him, and of these I don’t particularly remember when I actually received them.

The way I know him is the way I would like to think he would prefer to be remembered. I know him because I know his writing. I know the cadence of his language, his choices of vocabulary. His writing speaks a kind of poetry that is not flowery or weak; it is concise and speaks in the voice of a real person, someone who sees the exquisite detail of the world, but trusts that the reader to see it, too. His writing is sensitive, and it is crude. It is a full-bodied range of emotions which few writers ever manage.

I would like to think this is a trait we share. I would like to think that when I write, I write as he wrote, with an exactness that leaves a certain amount of detail up to the reader. I would never claim to know him the way others knew him, but I would claim to know him in a way others did not. I think that writing for some people, for people like him, and like me, is not just a hobby, or a talent, but an extension of the brain. I write when I am upset, when I’m happy, when I’m angry or insecure, and my writing reflects my emotions in ways I could never convey any other way. I think that this is how I knew Edward Lahey- when there was no way to describe something in person, there was always a way to write it. Even if I didn’t speak to him, his writing spoke to me. His life was a hard one, and that shows through in his writing, but what shows through more was that it was a life. Behind those words, there was a person with thoughts and feelings. While I may not have appreciated him as a common person, I appreciate him for his writing, and for the unique artist that he was. It pains me to think that there are no more words that he will write. I don’t write to speak for him, but I certainly write because of him. I write because I was inspired in his manner of recording the world he saw. His view of the place he called home will be missed, and it will never be replaced.