Personal Essay: Employing Symbols to Amplify Meaning in Difficult Storytelling Moments
This is an ordinary matchbox.
Though it’s less common to see wooden matches today, die-hard analogue flame enthusiasts still keep them around for lighting candles and campfires. In fact, the role of old-school matchsticks in iconic narratives such as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl gives the matchbox a fastpass to unlock nostalgia in storytelling.
This particular matchbox is unique among its peers. It found its way into my pocket on the eve of my Dad’s death in 2009.
I had taken a brief leave from teaching overseas and was spending what would be Dad’s final week at his side. We were completing various and sundry chores connected to his property maintenance contracts. It was a classic Canadian autumn, so we were putting storm window panes in place, removing floating docks and winterizing cottage water pump systems for Dad’s clients. A few fallen leaves danced on the grass as the trees held fast to their coloured cloaks of deep crimson, flame orange and brilliant gold.
The evenings were cool and the woodpile was stacked. Dad preferred the heat from his own firewood over the more costly electric options available in the home he built. Normally, the singular pleasure of lighting the kindling belonged to Dad, but with his waning energy he relinquished this duty to me. It was a little early in the season for a fire, but Dad was feeling cold. There was a sense of finality to every task that week. And each moment seemed charged with meaning.
A painfully intentional coffee chat with Bruce the Barber.
The awkward distribution of his favourite hunting gear to his buddies.
The veiled goodbyes and the relinquishing of earthly goods was making him lighter – easier to lift away when the time came. As Dad rose unsteadily from his final banking arrangements at the desk of an exceedingly youthful account manager, the kind and strapping twentysomething lad leapt to assist.
For some reason, in that moment I believe I truly hated that young man.
My anger seemed to focus on the juxtaposition of the banker’s handsome muscularity with Dad’s utter depletion. I seethed in silent rage at the unheroic downfall of a Herculean figure I once saw as an unassailable man of the woods.
“He wasn’t always like this,” I said coarsely. It seemed like a weak summation of a man who modeled strength of both body and of character for all the years I knew him. Only one strength remained now.
Memento mori, kid.
**
By the end of the week, Dad was gone.
The matchbox was a talisman that helped me get through the funeral necessities. I imagined its warmth radiating from a lasting imprint left by the man who first opened it and who had lit his own fires until he couldn’t. From my breast pocket the box migrated into my small collection of Dad’s belongings. A compass and a homemade utility knife were its chief companions for the quiet years it spent tucked in my bedside table as LeeAnne and I moved our family between teaching gigs in Asia and Africa.
The gesture of carrying the matchbox throughout our weeklong ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro was my attempt at a poetic expression of remembrance. With a penchant for the sentimental, I carried symbolic items for everyone close to me. The matchbox was among the lightest of objects as it contained nothing but a few remaining matches – and the weight of a soul.
Our unconventional route up the mountain had left us mostly spent. Thin air was claiming the last of our strength as our experienced guides came to relieve us of our rucksacks for the final few hundred meters of our climb. I became aware of someone kindly reaching out to take my dusty bag but I resisted.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “I need this.”
“Are you sure?” the young man asked. His obsidian eyes were sincere and his dark cheeks glowed with the energy of youth in the crisp light. “Bwana,” he said. “At this altitude, even something so small as a match can feel like a burden.”
I smiled and almost laughed aloud for how could he know my secret? I sincerely thanked him before rejoining LeeAnne for a joy-filled trek to the summit.
**
It was nearly a decade later when I retrieved the matchbox from the small chest where it was waiting. The time had come to fulfill a silent pledge that was made on that faraway mountainside.
Surrounded by family and friends as we celebrated the wedding of my eldest daughter, I shakily shared an abbreviated version of the matchbook’s history. Invoking the memory of absent family seemed to close a circle that surrounded us. The fireplace cast a warm glow and through the windows we witnessed flakes of lacy snow starting to fall on the stately maples. I slid open the box to reveal the visible contents: there were 3 matches – one for each of my daughters. Battered by time and imbued by meaning, the matchbook yielded both its story and the third-last of the remaining matches. Withdrawn from the dark box, the match flared with only a little encouragement. It was a small flame but it lit the space between the past and the future.
**
My youngest daughter’s marriage was celebrated four years later beneath a historic Roman arch on an overlook in central Germany. As the broad and silent Rhine continued its perpetually flowing journey through the valley below us, the wintergarden was filled with family and friends gathered from four continents of connections that would be unimaginable to my Dad. Born in the 1930s and educated in a one-room schoolhouse in backwoods Ontario, the global reach of his children and grandchildren is difficult to reconcile with his rustic roots. So, on his behalf, we witnessed what amounts to a sort of miracle: the second-to-last match illuminated the whole world from that hilltop an entire hemisphere away from home.
**
It was my middle daughter who, along with her partner, decided to marry on particularly special forested ridge on one of the coldest nights of the year. Traditions were abandoned in favour of expressions of deep meaning. The winter wind abated for the time we stood as in an unshaken snowglobe, the crisp air thick and still. Candles were already aglow when the final match was retrieved from the box and the story was shared once more. It was the night of the winter solstice, when darkness begins to roll away to make way for the coming of the spring light.
**
It has been said that we are only truly gone when someone speaks our name for the last time. I would rather think of it this way: perhaps the energy of our existence persists for as long as the love we have radiated continues to be felt by someone somewhere.
Energy, being neither created nor destroyed, is just transferred. The most commonly conjured example to teach this concept is, coincidentally, the match. Kinetic energy transferred to thermal energy transferred to chemical energy transferred to heat and light. These sensations enter our bodies to join with our own energy which is then shared through the living of our lives.
In this way, it may be our duty to employ symbols - such as matches or candles - and to seize the occasion to interpret the universal meanings of life in all its dimensions. Dad’s box of matches has done more than its maker (or owner) ever intended. Symbolic meaning through storytelling brings us to a place of sober contemplation about the stuff of life that is, at times, difficult to reconcile and often even more difficult to communicate. Despite my thrice inadequate (read: emotional) speechmaking at each of the match-lightings, random people subsequently shared how impacted they were by the symbolism. For them, they said, the image touched something inside their lives that was beyond the reach of words.
The matchbox is going back into my collection of memorabilia. It is among my dearest treasures for all of the reasons you can probably deduce.
Upon my demise, someone unfamiliar with the story of this object may find it and will likely toss it into a bin without hesitation. So they should. All outward appearances would suggest that this is a spent object and, in essence, this is unquestioningly true. Until that day, however, this faded cardboard box with its three charred matchsticks remains safely tucked away. It has borne witness to a surprising number of life events and it will, at least for me, continue to radiate warmth and make me smile from time to time.
____________
