A Father’s Day Lament

I loved hanging out with Dad. A football game, lunch with the family, or wandering the aisles of Home Depot while he found a new tool he’d justified buying by starting a new project, whatever we did was a chance to laugh and talk about whatever was on our minds. My first Father’s Day without him has me missing the ease of it all. The love of it all. The normalcy of that love and ease.

Feeling vulnerable but here we go…I’ve been dreading Father’s Day for months. Ten of them to be exact.

It’s my first without Dad and I’m not sure how to sit with this on a day devoted to thinking about him. About Mom and my siblings without him. About myself in comparison to him. About my own kids thinking about him and, maybe, what Father’s Day will be like without me someday. 

As a writer and teacher, the inventions of my imagination are generally where I find myself and what I need to help the people around me. Right now, they simply return me to the ache of missing Dad, a sensation as constant today as it was in the days just after he passed.

Ironically, it’s all the good memories I carry that surface this ache. Grief has wound itself around those moments like a vine twisted around tree branches, the sturdiness of our past giving sadness more permanence than it might otherwise have on its own.   

“I’ve found myself writing about Dad so much this year. If I tell the stories, even just to myself, he’s here for however long it takes me to get them down.”

Of late, I have been leaning into the meditative practice of visualizing emotions as weather. Acknowledge their presence. Their reality. But also, their transiency, that they will soon be replaced by different conditions. It’s been a helpful perspective added to my prayers.

But the weeks leading up to Father’s Day have been thunderstorms punctuated by sunny days that exist solely to be swallowed by the next dark cloud bank. The next change in barometric pressure. The next showers. Some are light, some heavy, but all dampening.

The guilt that falls with the rain doesn’t help. I can hear the comments. “He had a good, long life.” “You should just be happy you had a dad who cared and was there for you.” “You know we’re not supposed to ‘grieve as the others,’ right?”

And yet, he’s not here and I miss him. I guess I’m just really tired of living in a culture that has an entire industry designed to separate us from the process of death and hurry along our grieving because it makes others uncomfortable.

“Grief, it seems, leaves no emotions simple or singular.”

I guess, maybe, this is just me reminding myself that lament is necessary for healing and there’s no statute of limitations on grieving. I guess, maybe, what I need to grieve isn’t limited to just Dad’s passing, but that’s what’s right in front of me as Father’s Day approaches.

That’s why I’ve found myself writing about Dad so much this year. If I tell the stories, even just to myself, he’s here for however long it takes me to get them down.

Ironically, almost all of those stories so far have ended sad, even the goofiest ones. Dad was funny and kind and remembering it in specific ways makes me wistful when it used to simply make me smile. Grief, it seems, leaves no emotions simple or singular.

But I keep writing, hoping maybe these gray endings will give way to the gold of the simple joy spending time with him so often brought. They tell you to look for the sunlight at the edge of the darkest clouds, and I think that’s what I’m doing. It just so happens that the edge of one cloud feels like the face of another these days.

I believe that will change, but I’m still waiting for that faith to become sight. While I do, I write and I wonder how the grief of the people closest to Dad compares to mine. How my brother feels, a new grandfather himself, regularly holding new life in his hands. How my sister feels, knowing both that she’s more reserved with her words and feelings than me, and that she loved Dad so fiercely. How Mom feels, quietly navigating all of this in ways and waters I can’t even imagine.   

I wonder how we will make sense of this Sunday, each of us somewhere different on the path of grief and remembrance.

“Maybe there’s simple hope in the fact that I will continue looking. It’s all I’ve got at the moment and I think I’ll call that good enough.”

All this wondering and I have no answers, just more clouds on the horizon. I know this piece should offer some uplift. Or, maybe, I know that’s what some people reading it would like to find. I’d like to offer some, but that too seems just outside my ability to articulate.

Maybe there’s simple hope in the fact that I will continue looking. It’s all I’ve got at the moment and I think I’ll call that good enough.

Recently, a friend asked if I’ve been to visit Dad’s grave marker since it was installed at the National Cemetery.  I haven’t. Haven’t been able to make myself go. Won’t this weekend either.

As I write this, I can hear him grunt and say, “So? I’m not there anyway.” He was always so much more present than I’m capable of being.

So, I’m taking that as my cue. Instead of his grave, I’ll be at the beach with Heather and the kids, a place that always brings my family back to me and me back to myself. The forecast calls for nothing but sunshine and I’m banking hard on any clouds simply giving contrast to the light.