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My dad died in August 2020, and it felt as if half my own life was cremated with him. It was the first loss to hit me so dramatically; I kept thinking, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, with a weighty self-seriousness that was unlike me.
He had taught me how to read, how to swim the backstroke, how to throw a jab and a right hook.I’d never noticed fathers in general or the existence of Father’s Day, which arrived just a few weeks after my father’s death and during which I turned off my phone and laptop and watched NCIS because it had been our favorite series.
When I felt particularly tortured, I opened my dad’s last voicemail to me and listened to it.
Right after he died, all I ever wanted to do was talk about how great my dad was. People never quite related to that urge properly, leaving me feeling frustrated and thwarted at every turn. I was so dialed into my grief that it was unimaginable to me how people could talk to me about anything else. I wanted other people to tell me funny stories that made my father sound as cool and charming as I’d always believed him to be, without my having to ask for it. That was the thing that my dad’s old coworker did for me. I shot the signals of my mourning into space for months, fully expecting them to die unreceived. And when I least expected it, someone sent signals back that said, “You are not the last living witness to the relationship you had with your father.”
Our loved ones take so much history with them when they go. The death itself is never the only loss we’re mourning. The inside jokes we had with them become fragments of a dead language. The objects we shared with them become tchotchkes taking up space on our shelves. We’re loath to use the things we inherit from them, lest those things become ours and not theirs. My father died, and our relationship died with him, no matter how many emails I wrote into the willing void. Where there had once been a father loving his daughter who loved him, and 17 years of the relationship we’d shared, now there was only a grieving woman alone. When he was alive, my father was always the biggest, most magnetic man in the room. Now he’s up there, twinkling and shining.....
I miss you......
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