Who's Sad in America?

CHERYL LORENZ is.

Nancy is, too. Edward, maybe so, in a different way than Nancy, in a different way than Cheryl.

But Cheryl … Cheryl is the one whose name appears in all the eulogized newspaper articles. She’s taking the phonecalls, she’s making quotes. She’s bearing the responsibility of the end.

This week, the children of Dr. Chaos lost their father.

We will never know if Cheryl and he had a good relationship or not. Dads and Daughters … opposing ends of the familial spectrum in age, in sex, in viewpoints of the world.

And yet, both define each other’s intake of all things. A daughter’s sense of protection, stillness and strength come from her father. A daughter’s sense of humor comes in her father’s ability to present a stable or instable world for her. A dad’s understanding and sense of beauty, delicacy, place in society and social grace comes from his daughter’s genetic predisposition to care about such petty things. And a dad’s fragility is held tight in the soft palm of his daughter’s happiness.

A scientist’s daughter? A Daughter of Dr. Chaos? Well, one can only speculate what twists and turns their relationship have taken in the storm of familial weather patterns.

But since Tuesday, April 16, I’ve wondered about her. Cheryl. She’s the only one interviewed about the loss of the man at chaos' horizon. I’m assuming she’s the one calling the mortuary, calling the lawyers, receiving perfunctory notes of condolence – some polite, some political, some passionate – from his colleagues, protégés and adversaries. She’s survived him and his patterns, like Nancy and Edward, but she’s the one the scribes are quoting in the face of the end of her own particular chaos.

Eh, chaos never ends, really - it just begins again. But the man who started explaining that cycle to us - that Brazilian butterfly’s flap provoking a Texas tornado - is gone. His brain, his hope, his spirit, his future discoveries and philosophies, his unending quest to contain and predict the unpredictable – it’s gone. With the finite nature of this human constraint, there’s only irony left in this man’s disappearing act. Will he be buried? Will he be cremated? Will his atoms, protons, dormant viruses, cells be tossed into the winds of today, only to bring about the stolid knowing of one young scientist in 25 years that explains why we need to make sense out of chaos? Will his cells find a way to describe our need to storytell, mythologize and theologize the meaning in the meaningless? In my mind, there’s just no sense / no order / only chaos in losing a man who set into motion a path of conviction that could only serve to bring us to a global resolve of change. Sure, there are his students and followers. But the man is gone.

What’s left is his residue. What Cheryl’s left with … what damage, what growth patterns, what papers books and things left unsaid and world-changing things written. She and her siblings are the ones cleaning up after his tornado blew through their hallways, bedroom, late-night kitchen snacks or studies. And we're all left with a choice of carrying on for him or because of him.

A daughter’s loss of dad is a messy thing. I’m sure her middle-aged tears don’t make sense to her, if she indeed does cry for him. My own sadness for this NPR report that stopped me in my tracks - doesn't make sense to me, either. But then again, a complicated mourning of a lost relationship with a man driven by something inexplicable – that I know. And that’s probably the reason I’ve felt for their family this week, more than perhaps a stranger should.

The loss of Father Chaos. Creationists won’t miss him. Farmers won’t, either - they’ve been predicting weather for centuries – nothing new under their sun that he wrote papers about. His Ivy League buddies might. Meterologists will. Science won’t because he’s not vogue anymore.

But Cheryl will, good relationship or bad. When the man who explained chaos to you as a child dies, all sense in the world goes with him.

And as I write this, at 12:20pm on Sunday, April 20, 2008, the family, the followers and the others prepare to gather for the memorial service in Cambridge, Mass., for a man that prompted us as well to make some sense of the world for a brief time in the 20th century. As the weather changes, a traditional storm’s intensity compounds, and the ice caps melt into our souls’ histories, we are left with Chaos’ daughter, Complexity.

... it just never ends ...

For all daughters who have lost their fathers to science, or to love mis-expressed, or to tragedy, or to nature. This is for them …

~~~

Photo is Argentina's Gerogina Bardach during the women's 200m butterfly qualifiers of the South American Aquatics Championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 14, 2008. Courtesy of MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images.