Echoes of things lost

The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

One of the responsibilities that comes with being a creator—a writer, a musician, a podcaster, etc.—is cultivating an audience. I spend a lot of time on social media interacting with subscribers to Howlin’ and Circle of Fifths on Substack, on Facebook, on Instagram, on X, and on Youtube. On a few of those platforms, I’ve amassed enough of a following to keep me busy.

One of the things that I do is check out the profiles of all new followers. This is always interesting and is, at the very least, edifying and, at best, amusing. But sometimes it’s something else: a reminder of the echoes of things lost that most of us bear as a burden in our journey through life.

I’m aware that the act of looking at photos of broken families on social media and getting worked up about it makes me a sap, and you may have my man card if you wish. But I understand the context when I see a profile on social media with a status of “single” or “divorced” along with older pictures of a happy family. A picture really does say a thousand words, and I feel them all. The most affecting are the smiling photos with someone cropped out. The person who did the cropping was either very angry or very sad. Either way, I get them. So did Hemingway.

I have a good friend who is a local police officer known for always being calm and professional no matter the circumstances. When I ask him how he’s managed to be so polite and kind to so many people in very stressful situations over the years, he tells me, “Because you never know what kind of burden someone is carrying around with them.”

True that.

As most of you know, I, myself, am a single parent. I have an adult son out in the world who’s 22 and children who live with me who are seven and eight. I also have two long-term foster children who are four and six. These kids are, quite literally, my life. Anytime I’m not writing, broadcasting, or playing music is spent with them. And some of that time is spent with them as well. I’ve always enjoyed being around my kids. There’s nothing better than teaching a child how to read, throw a baseball, work on a car, ride a bicycle, or play a musical instrument. There is nothing more soulful than comforting a child who’s hurt or sad. And nothing beats watching your kids grow up to be fine adults. All of this, to me, defines joy.

Fostering is tricky. It helps, I think, to know your size. My role in foster parenting is supporting their birth family by caring for their children while they are taking the steps that they need to resolve the issues that led to having their children temporarily taken from them. I’m not a foster parent looking to take any kid away from a birth parent. The best outcome for my two foster kids is for their parents to get their act together and for the family to be reunited. I would never, unless it’s absolutely necessary and the final straw, advocate for any parent to have a child removed from them. It’s a pain that would make me wish for death.

In my view, if everything works as it should, in about 20 years from now, my two kiddos should be happy adults in their 20’s with happy parents who dote over their grandchildren. This is the best outcome for my two kiddos. But there is one more thing: they should be unburdened by any memory of me. Their childhood memories should be of good times with their mom and dad, not of the guy who took care of them when things were bad for a little while. That they should be allowed to forget.

Everyone on the team of social workers, medical professionals, advocates, teachers, attorneys, and judges is working to put my foster kids’ family back together and hopefully on a better path forward. If the big wheel in the sky has any sense of compassion, one day in the not-to-distant future it will be necessary for me to take my two foster children aside and tell them, for the last time, that I will always love and remember them, but it’s time for them to return home, and that it’s OK to forget about me. In fact, they should forget about me in order to go all in with their birth family. I’ll crop myself out of their memories to help them move on.

The world truly does break everyone at some point or another. And it’s generally not the adversity you see coming that breaks you; it’s abandonment and betrayal that you don’t see coming—almost always from loved ones. Every scar on my soul comes from someone who swore up and down that they loved me and would never do anything to harm or upset our family. When the “breaking” of which Hemingway so eloquently speaks is from people you loved and trusted, it comes with the searing heat of an atom bomb and the finality of an execution. It’s a knife in your heart that you don’t notice going in because it’s so difficult to process what has happened.

That’s what I see in a lot of old family photos on social media.

A while back, I arranged for a Zoom call for my foster kids with their birth mom. Both of them pretty much think of me as their father (their real fathers are uncertain), but clearly love their mother. These calls usually go on for about a half hour. On this particular day, the call lasted for about 5 minutes. When I asked the kids why, they told me that Mom had a TV show that she wanted to watch. I think that upset me as much as it upset them. And I did something that I had not done in years; I raged at the alleged powers that be.

This, my friends, is why I do not believe in religion in the sense that most people do. According to the religious, God (one of dozens, take your choice) generously provided us with sufficient tools and insight to understand how the world works all the way down to the quantum level while being simultaneously perverse enough to go around burying bones specifically to mislead palentologists. That’s messed up.

And you want to know what’s worse? Allowing two young children to suffer the pain of disappointment that my two kiddos did on that afternoon. There was no currency in it for the progress of humanity towards any sort of salvation: no nexus of future world events, no martyrdom for a greater cause, no lesson for the future, just pointless suffering. Those children will never forget that moment, just as I have not forgotten the times my father crawled off to a bar instead of taking me fishing like he’d promised, or the time my mom drank away the money we’d saved to buy a bicycle. You carry those burdens with you every day of your life. Don’t ask me how I know.

So yeah, I raged. What kind of perverse higher power, I yelled at the emptiness, puts this on a couple of kids? If there’s some point to all of this, put it on me. Take this burden away from these children who never did anything to anyone to deserve this, and put it on me, you asshole.

Of course, if anyone was actually paying attention, I guess that my situation seemed quite small next to the plights of six million innocent Jews killed during the Holocaust along with 60 million others who died while merely caught up in the surrounding circumstances. The world is a pretty fucked-up place.

So yeah, the world does break everyone. And what doesn’t kill you does make you stronger. The cruelest way it happens is through loved ones. And I sure do hope that this is actually just happenstance because if someone is actually arranging all of this, they’d better run if they ever see me coming.

But until that day, I will continue to do everything that I can to support any family that I can. I want to see photos of intact, happy families on the Interwebs even if I’m not in them. I may be a poor-ass substitute for whoever’s supposedly running all of this from the top floor, but if they are going to be AWOL, someone’s got to step up.

That means you too.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com