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Five Card Story: Mimesis

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a Five Card Flickr story by Kim Zicafoose created Jun 13 2025, 09:00:29 pm. Create a new one!

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Part I

Years ago, I buried my father. I hadn't gone to see him, the night before he died. I called him instead, the morning before his heart surgery. His voice was upbeat as he told me he would see me later, after the surgery. After the surgery, I talked to the surgeon instead, who told me that my father's heart would not start beating again when they had tried to restart it.

Part II

I was angry. Angry at the doctor's who said, "He wasn't a good candidate for heart transplant." Angry at the minister who said he was in a better place. I didn't want him in a better place. I wanted him here. Most of all I was angry at myself. He was going into the surgery, and on the last night of his life, Where was I?

Part III

Last week my brother called and complained that my mother, who has dementia, has never put flowers on my father's grave. I told him that was absolutely untrue, and that I knew for a fact that she had put flowers on his grave dutifully for years. It was bizarre to me that he did not know this, even more bizarre that he was suddenly concerned about it 22 years after my father's death. What is a grave anyway? A gravestone? A monument to the dead? What does it tell us of the one for whom it is erected. Do the pyramids of old tell us who their residents were? Archeologists may say yes, but I think we get only a partial story, written by someone else, not the dead.

Part IV

We do not know them in all of their quirky originality. Their hopes and fears, some ridiculous, many never voiced. We don't know what they cried about, what brought them joy. We see them through the eyes of others. I am not sorry that I don't visit my father's grave. He isn't there.

Part V

I wonder someday when I am gone. Will those that come after know me? Will they remember me for the person that I am? Will they care? Or will they see only that partial picture that is all any of us can really know of another. A mimesis that we create in our minds. A caricature. No more real than the stylized outline of a stained-glass window, that obscures rather than reveals.

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