The totality of Sting's album The Soul Cages revolves around the world where he grew up, in a shipbuilding town slowly strangling for want of business.  He mingles dream and reality throughout, generally choosing a voice of early boyhood, that frightening, exhilarating period between the discovery that the world is much much bigger and more mysterious than your childhood, and the building of the walls and habits that let you contain it sanely.   And for Sting, as for untold millions before him, the figure at that portal is his father.

            My father died at the moment I stood on that portal, too.  I was just shy of thirteen, of being a teenager, and the world was opening up for me.  It took a long time to come to grips with the knowledge that I would never come to grips with the loss.  Time scabs over wounds and we fool ourselves into thinking we've grown up and past our past.

            I almost never dream about my father, which I think is somewhat odd.  I can remember only one time that he played a central role, though for me, as for Sting, he is often perhaps the shadowy figure who sticks to the background.  The one time he did stand center stage, my dream world was unsettled:  At some moments I remember things as they are.  Other times, often in quick succession, I remembered things as they might have been had he never died.  I was fully aware of the contradiction, as was my father, but it didn't seem to matter.  This was that rarest of dreams, the one that didn't end with a blaring alarm clock.  It just went on and faded into a general state of consciousness.

            That one time, I woke up and I hurt in the same way, at the same strength, as when I was on the edge of thirteen.  I spent some time wrestling with my pain and my tears before I could even get out of bed.  But then, when I could and I did, I discovered I didn't hurt quite as much.  And I haven't, since.