Dishing It Out And Not Taking It

Dear Dad,

I’m usually asleep by now, but I’m thinking about you.

Tomorrow is your anniversary. Tomorrow marks six years since I heard your voice. It wasn’t the last time I saw your face — no, that is another date on the calendar. But in an hour, it will be August 26.

Your final day.

I still miss you, daddy. I keep thinking it will go away. I don’t feel sad every day now, and I think you’re happy about that. I have such a good, full life. I have a husband who loves me and two children who are as bright and shiny as any new penny.

I was laying in bed just now, wishing that tomorrow I could go to the cemetery to see you. I can’t, because I am so far from home. I’m living this strange, new life, dad, one that I think you would approve of. I take risks now, big ones, and they are paying off.

I stumble sometimes, and recently I was chastised in public for writing about you too often. For a moment, I was embarrassed. Shamed by the fact that I am still so close to the grief. Ashamed of needing you so much, still, even now, when I am on the cusp of middle age and you’ve been gone for so long.

Get over it, I think to myself.

Get over it, I hear them say.

Then I think about your last months, and how painful they were. I think about how you tried to be brave. I think about how I was a coward, turning my face from what was surely the mask of death. I wasted those last months with you wishing for you to live, when I should have been helping you die.

I’m sorry for that, daddy. I owe you an apology for that, one that I won’t ever get the chance to deliver.

So instead, I write to you, here in the ether.

The other night, in a parking lot, I told a friend how August gets me right in the guts, how it takes me and twists me and I don’t even realize it until I’m standing under some street lights in a strange place that’s slowly become my home, weeping.

“I’m doing all this stuff,” I said to my friend. “It’s just that I’m doing all these great things, and he isn’t here to see any of it.”

It’s hard to be away from mom, K and AJ on days like this one, when I want to be with the people who knew you best. When I want to be a family. We were a pretty good one, for a long time, us five. We were never perfect, but we always had love to spare.

Tomorrow is a day when I’m home. I stay with Henry, no babysitters. I try to keep my schedule open so he has some of my time, so he can just be with me.

Tomorrow is a day when I will be more grateful than usual to have him close by me. He is so joyful, daddy. He looks so much like you. He is just purely, utterly happy almost all the time, and so loving. He is everything you could ever want in a little boy, your grandson is.

Tomorrow, instead of laying flowers on your granite stone, I will hold close the warm, sturdy body of my boy and tell him about his grandfather, the one who loved M&Ms, just like he does. I’ll tell him how you fed me spaghetti and meatballs when I was his age, just like I do for him.

I’ll tell him how much I loved you, and how much you would love him. I’ll show him pictures, and hug him tight.

I will try not to cry, because that scares him.

We have plans to go out for dinner, to get a butterburger. Remember how much you liked those? Isn’t it funny how Emmie loves Culver’s, too?

We’ll have fries and ice cream, and I’ll try very, very hard not to remember what your eyes looked like in those last few minutes we were together.

I feel so far from home tonight, dad, and I don’t mean the physical places of my history. I mean that I feel so far from the time when I knew exactly what the rest of my life would look like.

But I’m OK, dad. I’m OK, but I really, really miss you. Especially today.

Love

Your daughter

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