On February 5, 2018, the Berlin Wall was gone for as long as it stood—10,316 days. My father was alive for just under 43 years and has been gone for about the same. In honor of the Berlin Wall I did a little math to figure out when his time on earth zeroed out. (Actually, I looked it up on the web—thanks, TimeandDate.com!) 

April 11, 1932 through January 10, 1975 = 15,615 days

January 10, 1975 through October 10, 2017= 15,615 days

So as I write this, the big day has already passed—I screwed up and missed it. With all the attention I’ve been paying the past couple of years to temporal symmetry in my life (i.e., my sons Lucas and Landon becoming as old as I’d been when my father died), you’d think I’d keep this ultimate symmetry in my sights. I even had notes to myself to do the math and determine the date for this celebration. 

I ignored them all, and probably did it with an intent that I kept hidden from myself. Right now, before your eyes, I’m going to deduce—from the empirical evidence of my own avoidance—why I failed in this self-appointed task.

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Theory #1: Ennui/Nihilism

According to this theory I avoided doing the math because it doesn’t matter how long my father lived or how long he’s been dead. My father is a horse I’ve flogged to death and back again a dozen times. By this point, he’s probably shouting “Leave me alone!” every time I think about him. Another made up “celebration” day like this one—created for no other purpose than to give me something to write about—means nothing more to him than being dredged up from the dead and brought back into a temporary kind-of-life that ends with him in the same state he started. 

It’s like I wake him up to make sure he was actually asleep. I put him in front of a groggy camera for my own self-aggrandizement, and then I thanklessly send him back to being dead. The ritual has nothing to do with him at all. It doesn’t matter, because nothing matters. Therefore I should shut down daddylabyrinth because not a single word of it has mattered to my life, or to my father’s unending death. 

Theory #2: Intrigue within My Tri-Partite Self

According to this theory I didn’t find the date because I knew I’d have a little “celebration” over it, and that this celebration would turn into yet another self-pity party. My super-ego, demanding some self-respect for a change, decided to deprive my id of this pleasure by withholding the date. Because my id is the part of me that most wants to wallow in self-pity—by, among other things, writing endlessly about my father in daddylabyrinth—my super-ego and ego must stop it by any means necessary, including deception. 

Enough pity parties! says my super-ego. Probably my ego too. Perhaps my ego is the one who’s been playing this cat-and-mouse con game the longest, manipulating both id and super-ego in its pursuit of control. How else can you explain that, although I initially missed my father’s “Berlin Wall” date, I ended up celebrating it belatedly and having an even bigger pity party? It must be my ego, letting my super-ego win one day and my id the next, reminding them both who truly decides when the pity parties begin and end. 

Theory #3: Learned Helplessness and the Purgatory Thing

According to this theory I avoided the date because I knew I’d spend it trying to pray my father out of purgatory, which I know is hopeless. It’s not really my decision, right? Though they say we should pray for our dead loved ones anyway, which I haven’t been doing nearly enough. Learned helplessness is why I don’t. Just as I wasted my youth as a shell-shocked boy afraid of his father, I’m spending my manhood being afraid that I can’t help my father. Learned helplessness has simply transformed, like a tadpole into a frog. 

In order to protect myself from the heartbreak of not being able to pray my father out of purgatory, I blotted this date out of my mind—though it may have been the best date of all to release us both from the bounds I’ve slipped us into. But I can’t do that, because my soul depends on my clinging to him. Even though I had a chance to break the spell and give him peace, I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t let go of the helplessness that I learned. I can’t get him out of purgatory, the logic goes, so why should I even want to? Why not enjoy the static uncertainty that purgatory promises? 

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There you have it, dear reader. All these theories have their flaws, but I’m sticking to them and they’re sticking to me. I blew my chance at figuring this out definitively when I let October 10, 2017 slip by unnoticed, and now all I have is my hindsight—20/20 in theory, but in reality just as much a mess as my every living moment. Figments visible under countless filters that bring coherence for exactly as long as I look through them, and no more.