The death of a parent is something that you carry with you for the rest of your life. Most people my age do not have to deal with such heartache until much later in their life. I, however, have always been ahead of the curve. My father died when I was still a baby. I’ve had people tell me that it was lucky that I was so young, insisting that my youth meant I wasn’t able to understand it enough to truly feel pain over the loss. I wish that they were right. My understanding was watered with tears spilled over the very man those people told me I didn’t remember well enough to mourn. What I was too young to understand was that no one has the right to tell you how to handle a loss as great as losing a parent.
The harsh reality of life is that it ends, and I don’t mean our own lives. It’s the loss of the people you love that is often the cruelest reality, the reality that cuts deep into your heart and never quite heals. There will come a time when all of our parents die, and I know that everyone hates to think about it. We don’t want to think about such sad things, telling ourselves that life is too short to think about things like dying. Life is too short, and that is precisely the reason we need to talk about death. It happens when you least expect it, and when it happens it leaves a path of destruction in its wake. We must talk about it so that we know that we are not alone in our feelings of sorrow.
My father’s death affects me to this very day, in ways that I never expect. It’s funny how even in death, a parent always plays a role in their child’s life. During grade school, I didn’t understand why the other kids had dads, and I did not. New friends would ask what my father did for a living, and I did not know how to tell them that he wasn’t even living. I would dread taking family photos because standing next to a gravestone made me feel different than the other girls my age. I would write letters to my father every year, but they don’t deliver mail six feet under the ground. I grew older and learned to handle my pain by smiling and making jokes because if I was laughing; I was not crying.
My father is dead and gone, no metaphor can bring him back to me.
This is not to say that my life was particularly horrible. I had father figures and my mother loved my sister and I dearly, I dare not say ‘to death.’ No, that was the way my father loved us. Losing a parent is a hurt that I cannot begin to write about because it is something words cannot encompass. I can write to tell you that death does not steal all traces of a parent. I see my father in the feathers of a red bird. I see him in the clouds and in my dreams. I see him in the curve of my nose and in the height of my sister. I see him all around me, and I know that I am never alone. Even when we lose our parents to death, we are never truly rid of them because they live on in our very blood. They live on in the sound of our laughter, and in the midst of our heartache.
In the end, I found that it did not matter whether I was laughing or crying. It didn’t matter because my father lives on in me through both rough and calm waters.
He loves me to death and beyond.
