Chapel Perilous

Explaining the perspective

Waking from the dream again — Dad, my sister, and me at a tavern table, the three of us sharing a meal that never quite resolves into words — I sit up in the dark and feel the old familiar shift. The dates have lined up once more. June 21. Her birthday, sixty-six years now since she came home from the hospital on our parents’ first anniversary. Father’s Day hovering nearby like an empty chair. I reach for the notebook I keep by the bed and write the first lines that will become this piece, the one you’re reading now.

I don’t have a name for the state at first. It just feels like the ground has gone slightly translucent again, the way it did in the months after Dad died with his work still open on the computer screen. The way it did when Mom fell three months later and the words began to leave her. Everything I thought I understood about family, about legacy, about what a son is supposed to carry — it all went soft at the edges. Fears I didn’t know were still living in me started showing their teeth: the old money panic from Richmond days, the worry that I arrived too soon and made things harder for everyone, the quieter dread that the work I’m doing now with the foundation might not be enough to keep his chair warm.

Robert Anton Wilson called this place Chapel Perilous. I met the phrase years ago in Cosmic Trigger and filed it away the way you file a map of territory you hope never to need. Then one day you look up and realize you’ve been walking it for months without knowing the name. The legends say everything you fear waits there with slavering jaws. They also say that if you carry the right implements — intuition, sympathy, reason, and a certain stubborn courage — you can come out the other side with something the old stories call the Elixir. I don’t know if I believe the stories literally. I just know that when I sit with the dream, or stand behind the counter at Daily Provisions listening to the younger crew laugh through the noise, or open the foundation site and see the photo of Dad’s study with Hudson still watching the empty chair, something in me steadies.

The first tool that showed up was the dream itself. I’ve learned not to dismiss these visitations. Jung would call them compensatory, messages from the parts of the psyche that haven’t finished speaking. In the tavern I keep trying to hear what Dad is saying, or what my sister and I are not saying to each other across the table. Sometimes I wake with only the feeling of unfinished conversation. That feeling has become part of the work. I write it down. I carry it into the foundation meetings. I let it sit beside the practical tasks of preserving his papers and his memory. The dream doesn’t solve anything. It keeps the three of us in relationship while the outer forms keep changing.

Sympathy came next, or maybe it had been waiting all along. When I wrote about the pennies scraped together for Surfadil when Melissa had chickenpox, or the milk Dad bought on his night shift at Thalheimer’s only to have it stolen from the car, I felt something loosen in my chest. Those stories used to sit in me like evidence of failure — his, mine, the whole early family system. Now they feel more like the ordinary cost of two young people trying to make a life while history moved around them. I can hold sympathy for the father who juggled bills and the mother who left her job at the Virginia State Library without having to decide whether they did it “right.” That shift didn’t happen by thinking harder. It happened by writing the sentences and then reading them back as if someone else had written them.

Reason and courage showed up in stranger disguises. Reason looked like the old enterprise-architecture habit of mapping systems — only now the system was grief, legacy, and the difference between my sister’s way of carrying the family story and mine. She stays closer to the daily care of Mom, more private with the larger narrative. I build the foundation and publish these reflections. Both tunnels are real. Neither has to cancel the other. Courage looked like clocking in for another shift at Daily Provisions when my body wanted to stay home, or picking up the phone to call Mom even when the conversation will be mostly one-sided. It looked like publishing the piece about Father’s Day and her birthday even while knowing she might not want the spotlight. Courage, in this stretch of Chapel Perilous, has mostly been the willingness to keep moving without needing the map to be complete.

The strangest tool has been gratitude. Not the polished, Instagram version. The rawer kind that arrives after you’ve let the shadow stories have their say. Sitting with the fact that I almost wasn’t born because money was that tight, that Dad died with research still in progress, that Mom’s words are leaving and the house on the hill is no longer hers to keep — and still being able to say, without forcing it, that I’m grateful for the whole improbable sequence. That gratitude doesn’t erase the hardship. It re-imprints it. It turns the same facts into a different story, one in which the service we learned — “paying our rent for our presence on planet earth” — was forged in the very places that once felt only like scarcity.

I’m still inside the Chapel, or at least its outer rooms. The fears haven’t all been disarmed. Some days the empty chair feels heavier than others. Some days the difference between my sister’s privacy and my public excavation feels like a wound instead of a complementary rhythm. But the writing helps. The foundation helps. The shifts at Daily Provisions help. The practice of remembering myself in the middle of whatever tunnel I’m currently inhabiting helps. And the dream keeps returning, as if the three of us are still trying to finish that meal, still trying to say what needs saying before the check comes.

Wilson said you come out of Chapel Perilous either a stone paranoid or an agnostic. I seem to be choosing the latter, one sentence at a time. Not because agnosticism is easier, but because it leaves more room for the Elixir the old stories promised — whatever that turns out to be in this particular life. For now it looks like the capacity to keep the father’s work warm without being possessed by it, to honor my sister’s different path without resentment, to sit with Mom in her increasing silence without needing her to remember who I am, and to keep writing these dispatches from the middle of the transit.

I don’t know how it ends. I just know how things seem to me right now, on this June morning after another tavern dream. The chair is still empty. The dog is still watching. And I am still here, trying to pay the rent with whatever tools I can carry.