How curious it is a split second can hold the fullness of time.
It is late evening when I raise my phone and see the photo of the man sitting side-on in a chair, shoulders hunched from a life spent toiling over a workbench with a tiny screwdriver and soldering iron. The figure is small in the scene, down low to the right, and while there is much happening in this photo, for a split second, my eyes see only the man; his posture, his black jeans, black hoodie and black sneakers. He is staring at something off to the left of the shot.
A single thump of my heart breaks against my ribs. My father is here, alive. But where?
This shock sensation is fully formed, yet within that same split second my sense reminds me that my father is, indeed, dead. He is here, if but a haunting presence captured by my heart.
I am solemn now, breathing through a pain in my lower ribs as I trace my eyes around the moment. The photo was taken years ago. There I am in the background, also in black jeans and a hoodie, my first child just the slightest bulge in my belly. I’m doing something at a plastic fold-out table, the kind you find at community halls and markets. Perhaps I’m making a cup of tea. My husband is also standing at the table, his back to the camera. I don’t recall where that table came from. It wasn’t ours, but it is our house—at least, the skeletal structure of it. We’re there upon the bare yellow-tongue boards, beneath exposed ceiling joists and rafters, and within a frame that is open to the elements. It is autumn six years ago, almost to the day. And there is Dad, staring pensively at something in the garden. Staring in the manner that people with Alzheimer’s do. Once upon a past he would have been full of conversation; full to the brim, for he never knew how to end one. But there he sits, frozen in time, looking out, looking content.
Three years ago in mid-March, I’d sat with my father in the garden at a small nursing home as his blue eyes turned grey. He had stopped eating, but made an exception for a chocolate paddle pop—he’d always had a sweet tooth—and I had wondered how long he could survive on paddle pops alone.
The following night in the wee hours before dawn, I was awoken by a phone call. Wrapped in a dressing gown, I walked out into the darkness of the mountains and stood under the stars as they fell from the heavens. My father was gone.
I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in the gods of religious texts, although I find them interesting. I have no set spirituality, though I do see a connectedness between all things. I tend to gravitate toward us being here for no apparent reason. Amid all the unknown, I can confidently say I have no certainty of anything, and I’m wary of anyone that does.
But I am haunted. I am haunted by a stream of uncanny coincidences—ordinary things that happen at the strangest times, like drifting off then waking up hours after Dad’s death to the song ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ on the television, which has never happened before, or taking Mum to a café to mark Dad’s birthday and having the table next to us sing Happy Birthday at the precise moment the waitress placed two cakes in front of us. Or, the other day on the three-year anniversary of Dad’s passing, having a Mozart playlist I was listening to suddenly interrupted with a song by John Martyn called ‘Spencer The Rover’, a song Dad loved back in 1974 and which Mum played to him as we sat under the gingko tree in his final days. He smiled. There’s the time three-days after Dad’s death when I noticed an old café in Wangaratta called Muddy Waters. The café is named after the river, but throughout my life, Dad often recounted the time he saw the blues singer Muddy Waters at a basement bar in New York. It was a story he loved to tell because it was the night Bob Dylan peed next to him at the urinal. Bob, that particular night, was on the drums. I passed that café for seven straight years before noticing it. Dad and I had even eaten across from it. Yet, days after Dad’s death, it became glaringly obvious to me. It took me until last month to visit it. I sat out in the courtyard, ordered, and began flicking through literary journals, pausing reflectively when the story I was reading contained the words ‘muddy water’.
Music, as it is for many, was a big part of our lives and many of my memories of Dad are tied up with song. Since Dad’s passing, the music shows up at the oddest times, seemingly out of context. Some may call them synchronicities, others, hauntings. I enjoy them. They warm me with nostalgia and bring my father near. But I don’t believe my father is sending little messages through words and song, coordinating the timing and movements of others to match mine. Rather, I believe it’s my mind dressed in the white sheet.
I’ve been thinking about why such coincidences have surged since my father’s death and I’ve found a clue. It’s something a friend of mine who lost her father also noticed: I ‘see’ Dad everywhere. I double-take at almost any tall, lanky man in jeans and a Panama hat. Often, they look nothing like him, but there’s something in their movements, their clothes, their posture, that catches my eye. This doesn’t happen with other people in my life. I don’t walk around town thinking I see my mother or husband or close friends, all of whom are still with me. And I never mistakenly thought I saw Dad before his death. Only now, in the aftermath of loss does this occur, and it signals something to me about what my brain is doing.
Almost all of what we see and hear is not remembered by the brain.1 Millions of bits of information flow through the brain at any given second, even in our sleep, and our brains expertly filter this information down to a manageable fraction—often just three to five ‘chunks’ of information. It’s called Selective Attention and it focuses us on what is most necessary. Our brains purposefully forget the rest. The forgetting part is crucial because it creates space for the things that must be remembered.
What we focus on has a lot to do with our experiences, and the more we focus on a particular thing, the more likely we are to notice those things in our lives. This happens because the neurons that fire together when that thought process occurs strengthen the more they are used, making them more likely to be used again.
In essence, the name of the Muddy Water’s Café wasn’t as important to me while Dad was alive. I passed it for seven years, it fleeting through my mind and disappearing before I ever knew it had been there. But as neurons associated with memories of my father triggered more frequently after his death, the words took on a new weight that allowed them to pass through my selective attention and into my working memory.
There is so much around us that we fail to perceive unless it is brought to our attention, and these things are not necessarily small or inconsequential. I now see connections to my father everywhere, often appearing out of context, and I’m comforted by this string of strange coincidences. They are hauntings of sorts, but most likely hauntings born of my own mind. At least, that’s how I choose to explain it today. Like I said, who could ever truly be sure.
Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe on Substack or your favourite podcast app, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a month. Until then, keep 💪
Theories of Selective Attention in Psychology, Simply Psychology.
