Sometimes when I am sitting alone at my favorite spot for drinks, I see a young person—I don’t know how young; I can no longer discern such things—walking by with, perhaps, a friend, and garbed in the attire and dyed hair of their great and glorious and searching youth. Sometimes they tread in Doc Martins and I smile at the way some shared tastes prevail despite all else that separates who we are and what life we lead. And sometimes, when the weather is right, and the wind blows in a certain way, and the music is quiet in the background, and the sky is big and cloud-filled, and the leaves are budding out, and my glass holds a second or third ale, I suddenly see the faint outline of a ghost walking with them, and that ghost looks familiar to me, is me, a younger me with the same self-conscious gait of thirty-five years ago, and the same sense of wonder, and the same wide-open road ahead. In a moment like that I smile, and I hope with all my being that those friends get to have even half the experiences I had—and all of the joy.

This is a feeling better than nostalgia, for it recognizes the passing of time and the necessary changes the passage brings without resorting to sentimental and revisionist histories of how good things once were before they got oh so bad. Nostalgia too often devolves into pablum, as in the recent social media trend of posting memes about growing up in the 1970s without supervision and confronted with any number of dangers threatening a child’s life each day, such as no seatbelt laws, scorching metal slides on sun-baked playgrounds, and lax environmental rules. The memes are meant to suggest that Generation X—my generation—are born survivalists, and that subsequent generations have had it soft and just can’t take it—whatever “it” is. But Gen-X has no greater sense of irony than any of the other generations that didn’t have their own Alanis Morissette; it is my peers, after all, who raised Gen-Z and gave them the technology and ahistorical point-of-view that we claim has rendered them useless. It is Gen-X who posts the anti-Z memes on their smartphones—all while complaining that kids these days are glued to… yes… their smartphones. Every generation finds a way to complain about those that came after, usually emphasizing the disappointment and forgoing the praise. Nostalgia, but not understanding.

There is a great deal of room for nostalgia after the death of a family member, but also for reflection of the kind that can be quite painful. As with all else in life, the good and the bad commingle to form a best assessment not only of the deceased, but of oneself in relation to him. If I am the blazing slide-surviving Gen-X son, who was my Silent Generation father I have now lost to that last common experience we all share—death? What can be said of us as father and son that resists the usual refrains of the eulogy? It would not be honest to say I have only asked these questions in the few days since he passed. I have asked them often, and for many, many years. And these questions precede me in being asked by children since time immemorial. I have usually left the answers—the understanding—incomplete, as in “Reconciliation,” written just a few months before my father’s death, which was really about someone else’s father and about a town I left behind at the exact moment I also left my parents. And it was about me.

Every writer is a bit of a narcissist I suppose. The act of writing presumes both skill and purpose, and most of us keep doing it regardless of the opinion of others. Like terrible shower singers, our singing sounds just fine to our own ears. When someone close to you dies, you’re left behind to sing the song—you and all the others who once knew that person. But of course, each one who remains sings a different tune. You never know a person in full, so you say what you can about what you know. You try to be honest. But even honesty doesn’t get you very far in constructing a coherent narrative. What of the happy times? What of the angry times? What of me now that he’s gone?

I have asked these questions over and over, hoping that I could conjure into existence the right words to speak about my father, but unlike when I go on and on about most other things, I’m truly at a loss for words—or, perhaps more accurately, they are coming begrudgingly. Not only am I a much more private person than many people likely suspect, I’ve reached the conclusion in my fifty-one years that I did not know my father, nor was he much interested in being known. He was a much more private person than many people likely suspect.

I don’t believe I could write an elegy for my father. I am not the man for that job; I am not inclined toward elegiac writing, though I have no objection to it and do sometimes enjoy the form in the hands of others. And the deeper knowledge of a person needed to write an elegy? I do not possess that. Like most others who knew him, I have only facts. He was born in 1936. His own father died when my dad was only seven. He lived in a small house on Mason City Hill in Nelsonville, Ohio with his never-remarried mother, his younger sister, and occasionally one or more grandparents. He graduated from Nelsonville High School in 1955, worked for the state forestry service, lived briefly in Columbus, returned to work for Kroger in 1957, married the girl across the street, was drafted into the Army and served in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and came home in 1962 to work at Kroger until he retired in 1991. In that space he raised four children, only two of whom remain. There is no elegy here—just a life lived as best as he could.

Like many do, my father may have regretted the choices he made. He rarely told contemporary stories about his life, instead telling and retelling those of his childhood and the people who populated it—an assorted lot of friends and family members who made very few appearances in the life he had as an adult. He was certainly not raised to make empowered decisions about the trajectory of his life. Few in the Silent Generation were. For many decades after World War I, America was an oppressive and stifling place, and Generation X is likely the first that could say, “Fuck it, I’ll do whatever I want.” Which is what I did, and what ultimately led to a generational impasse with my father that was never resolved. If I never really knew my father it is also true that he never really knew me, and the freedom I insisted on when I turned eighteen was something he never had. I’m not certain he really understood why I fled to all corners of the globe, but I’m certain I never understood why he stayed.

On many occasions he waxed longingly about his time in New Mexico—a time in which he and his wife were young and far from home, raising their first child in a land startlingly different from what they had always known. I remember my experience of arriving in the Middle East as a member of the Navy not long after being just a stupid high school kid from Logan. The sheer enormity of the experience, the breathtaking wonder of it, the whole vast cultural shock of standing in the sands of Saudi Arabia and the stopping of a whole city during the call to prayer, altered my being in ways both profound and permanent. I know my parents must have felt something of that in the haunting desert landscape of New Mexico. But my father went home. I never could. There was just way too much to experience, and whatever I had that counted for a soul, grown there in the hills of Hocking County, demanded that I not let it slip away. When you get used to running, stopping seems like an impossible option.

I recall my father telling me several times that he wished he had stayed in the Army, had stayed in New Mexico, had done something different than he had. Of course the butterfly effect reminds us that doing so would have meant my other two sisters and I would never have been born. The winds off the Sandia Mountains would have blown all that away, leaving a whole different sixty years ahead of him. Although he may not have regretted his children, I will always wonder if he thought about what might have been.

There is a great deal of regret in the act of living a life, but I doubt most people like to talk much about that. Regret might seem to most of us too much like admitting failure. It is so much easier to pretend our every step was intentional and brought us to exactly where we were supposed to be. But that is just an act of rewriting in order to soften the edges of an otherwise craggy narrative. Revisionist history allows us the opportunity to reinsert ourselves as the always central character of our story, however an incidental part we might have actually played in any given episode. Nostalgia can do the same. Do you think that girl you had a crush on all throughout high school spends her time wondering what has become of you? Not likely. The grade school building and the high school building where I learned how to be in the world have been torn down. Many of my teachers have passed away. Miss Mosure. Mrs. Keller. Mr. Fickel. Mr. Tipton. Mr. Rau. And I have lost track of most others. Playgrounds are now made of plastic and soft, mulchy ground. Time passes and your experiences don’t matter much outside of your own head and, if you were able to keep them, to a small group of childhood friends.

If my father had regrets, I do not know what they were. He kept those hidden away as he kept most things. If he had truly wanted something else and spent life saddened at never achieving it, I do not know. I have spent most of my life scratching my head at the fact that I am very much my father and very much not. And now I will spend the rest with a wish that I had found a way to know him—that I could have written an elegy in his honor. Perhaps if I had known he was walking alongside me, the faint outline of a ghost walking with me, a ghost that looks familiar to me, with the same self-conscious gait of seventy years ago…