Apathy and Detachment
I am having a difficult time differentiating between apathy and detachment. The freedom that comes with detaching yourself from people, outcomes and things is foreign to me. The lack of caring that comes from apathy is something I often feel guilt and anger towards. Perhaps the only difference between apathy and detachment is my reaction.
Part of my transpacific pre-flight preparation involves finding a song. This song is the one I will listen to for the majority of the flight. I am a person who likes to have one song, on repeat, so it becomes a controlled background noise but not something that will hold all of my attention. For my December 2019 flight, that song was “Superposition” by Young the Giant.
The flight that song was chosen for, was taking me to spend a quiet Christmas with my parents. It was a seemingly perfect, unassuming, quiet and comforting holiday. The day I left for the airport my father complained about neck pain. We all assumed he slept wrong on his pillow and that the pain would dissipate. Little did we know that was the humble start of the race to his death.
Less than 2 weeks later, in January 2020, I was back on a plane to see him in the hospital. While the doctors ran their tests, they could not provide us with a definitive cause for his pain or a prognosis for the future. His nurse, however, offered a vague but honest, and accurate, assessment. She said, “I want you to know that he is very very sick. He will not be here long.” While the doctors could not back up that statement with their tests, she was confident in her judgement.
After a week I had to return home. On the way to the airport, we stopped by the hospital one more time. As I was getting ready to leave, my dad grabbed my hand and said, “wait, just a few more minutes. I want to spend a few more minutes with you since I will never see you again.” As I walked out of his room, number 424 to be exact, I didn’t believe he could be accurate in his statement.
Fast forward to early March 2020, turns out he was right, and I jumped on the first flight I could get to see him. They were keeping him alive with oxygen until I got there. He hadn’t spoken or opened his eyes in days and less than 24 hours after I arrived, he passed.
We have never had a funeral. We haven’t even spread the ashes. We can’t see family since the international border is closed. We can only continue on each day. Going through our routines and taking the situations as they come.
The opening verse of the song “Superposition” says:
I don’t believe in fate
No psychic vision
But when things fall into place, superposition
In any universe you are my dark star
While my dad didn’t believe in psychic’s, I believe that as we get closer to death we remember more about where we came from and where we are going. It is in that remembrance that we begin to know more things. He knew that in January, in room 424, that would be the last time he would see me.
He just knew.
Like the song lyrics, he now watches from above, and catches my attention every so often by calling me to look up at the star that shines every night into my living room.
Like so many people, my life has dividing line. That line is March 2020. Events happened before and events happened after. However, with the events of that month I feel apathetic towards anything that occurred before. I feel detached to anything that is occurring now. Yet sometimes, internally, I feel at peace. It is when I feel at peace, I think I am detached, in the best way possible. It is when I feel angry and guilty that I think I am apathetic, in the worst possible way. There is beauty in detachment and fear in apathy. There is beauty in death and fear in living. It is when we are detached from everything but our hearts that we are truly attached to everything and everyone.
