Dad's Poem

“We’re born. We live. We decay. We die.” It was a poem my dad had written during his attempt at getting a college degree. 8 words to define the totality of existence. For the happy-go-lucky man my father is, it felt a bit too…edgy. But that’s the thing with depth right? It’s hidden below the surface.

I found that poem shoved in a random box in my unfinished basement my sophomore year of high school, but I didn’t ask him about it until college. He surprisingly didn’t say much, but it had a big impact. It was a moment of mutual understanding. Depression has this ability to separate you from the ones you love and look for some meaning in life. A lot of times, people with depression feel like they fail in that quest.

In the early 90s, my dad had written a poem to express his defeat at finding purpose, yet when I asked him about it – this defining moment in his existence – he had practically nothing to say. Because he didn’t need to say it. For a moment, my dad and I had a mutual, silent understanding of our existences, having both struggled with depression. The difference was that in his quest for meaning, sometime over the last thirty years, my dad had found it. This interaction gave me hope that anyone can find purpose if they look in the right places, which for me was the beautiful subtleties of everyday life – the in-between moments of peace and content.