Dad isn’t fading away from my memories, but the reality of him is. I find myself thinking of dad almost as if he were like an imaginary friend or a figment of my imagination than as a real person. It’s an odd thought considering your father to have never existed, but to have been made up the entire time.
I know it’s a ridiculous thought. I couldn’t be here if he didn’t exist. I know this. I just can’t remember him being real. Or rather, I can’t remember him being real without it hurting real bad. He was here, and now he’s gone and not coming back. It’s like missing a body part. Better to think of it never existing to begin with.
I’m starting to have dreams of him now more often than in years past. I’ll ride the bus with him, or eat with him, or do any other such mundane activities with him. In the dream he is still alive and still strong (sometimes he and my mom are still married). These aren’t the nightmares or bizarre dreams that I used to get. These are almost like memories. Future memories. I’m not sure what the dreams are. They’re desires, I suppose. Desires for something that cannot be.
With the back of my eyes I see you, but all that’s in front of me is a blank wall or a tree or the sky or just the reflection in the mirror staring back.
A few weeks ago I found a couple of books that reminded me of you. I’ll probably never read them but I bought them anyway. I put them on your bookshelf in my living room and pretended that you bought them. It was a brief respite from the reality of your death.
I miss you. Five years you’ve been gone now, and you’re no closer to coming back. It doesn’t seem fair. I had plans. Hopes and expectations now relegated to dreams that I sometimes remember. I hate that I think of you as an imaginary person. I hate that peeling back the facade of that defense mechanism leaves me feeling empty. It makes me want to call you so that you could reassure me. Bitter irony.
I’m well taken care of, and I hate to sound ungrateful, but it just isn’t enough. You left an awful hole and the whole world can’t plug it up.
Sometimes I try to hang onto the sad feeling as long as possible because I just want to remember you as a real person for a little while. It validates my existence, but it also makes me feel you, if that makes any sense. There’s a whole portion of me that lays dormant now because you’re gone. Do I let it die, or do I revive it from time to time to let it grieve?
It’s weird to think that there’s a part of me missing because you aren’t here to bring it out of me. Does this part just disappear, or does it get redistributed to different facets of my life? I do talk more about you to people (whether they want to hear about you or not…and whether I feel comfortable bringing you up in conversation or not). Perhaps the whole of me is changing to accommodate those things in you that I lost (whatever that means).
Father’s Day is a fake holiday, but I mostly say that because my dad is gone. It’s a holiday now relegated to memory and unfulfilled desires. No card to buy. No phone call to make. No gift to mail down south. Just memory and imagination.
I knew a man once. He was big and strong and funny and rather brilliant. He was obnoxious to be sure, and he could be fierce when angry, but his love was genuine and tender. My memory recalls him, but it just can’t pull all of him together. I remember him in pieces. On the rare days I do recall a sharper picture of him I immediately remember his box of ashes. I remember the whole only to remember the loss in whole.
I miss him and I want him back. And I wish I could tell him that. Bitter irony.
Words are not enough, but they are all I have. My emotions are inexpressible, my thoughts are beyond my ability to understand, and my tears only serve to obscure what I thought I understood.
Where are you?
Who are you?
I miss the sound of his voice and his laugh. I miss his pontifications. I miss knowing he was always there.
I regret I cannot introduce my friends to him. I regret being unable to call him on the phone or to visit him.
I’m saddened with the prospect of living several more decades without him. In less than three decades I’ll have lived longer than I knew my father. That seems unfathomable. The man I talked to every day silent for so long. That’s an unbearable thought.
I’m sad that this is all I can say for Father’s Day this year. I love my dad, but I cannot reach him. My heart transcends the boundary between life and death, but my mind and my body remain here on this side of the dividing line and it is an unsettling feeling.
These words are mere shadows to what I actually feel. Likewise, my memory is only a shadow of the man my heart still fully loves in a present sense. My heart does not love the memory- it loves the man.
The memory does not provide comfort, but merely confirms the object of my affections. It is a snag upon which my love trips and falls. It is the tear in my mind that both confirms my dad’s absence and yet preserves my affections. I see through it like a hole in the wall. Both my affection and his absence. It reminds me constantly of both. I do not love the memory, I love the person the memory stands in memorial to.
Greater Expectations 