Dad

I want you to know how it feels to not remember your father.

I want you to understand that when he died he was ripped so suddenly and inalterably away that it would have seemed inconceivable that I could ever forget him. That I screamed non-stop for hours and then was silent for days. Weeks.

How can you forget stubbly kisses, whiskey breath, couch cuddles during MASH, and that one-side-only smirk that made dark eyes sparkle?

When it was just yesterday and you look down a life impossible to live without those things, you could not imagine how to forget.

You wish you could forget.

I want you to know that I do get to dream of him sometimes — and that is some of the best dreaming I’ll ever have…

But, these dreams are always empty feeling like his flesh and soul have become a mannequin: just a flat, blank doll.

The dreams don’t give me the eyebrow-raised, laughing face and the hands that would hold me close to a warm, beer belly when I cried.

When he was alive, you would know he was near, by a sheer force of willful presence. But, the dreams are always a caricature of a symbol of something barely grasped. You can look deeper and deeper at the person in the dream and it never becomes him, it only resolves into a shape of a human of similar coloring.

I want you to know that, over decades, every once in a while, I get a dream where he seems alive again and I can remember things I have forgotten – like Barbasol and Old Spice, like the sound of a bass voice that becomes higher pitched and faster as the quips come out, or the way that so many jokes just ended in, “Oh,” as an acknowledgment that the sarcasm had passed.

And I live for these dreams.

I want you to smell it too, his breath when he leaned close to tell me a secret, when he more often smelled like cigarettes and beer. I need you to know I know that it wasn’t all happiness and that sometimes I was scared when he came home too late, too drunk, too tired, and had given up on life. I want you to hear the babbling, incoherent mumbles under the scratchy tapes playing Neil Young in the middle of the night.  I need you to know that I loved him anyway, that it still hurts beyond words and that the scars haven’t gone, never will.

I want you to see him in a front yard overgrown with grass and littered with stones and stumps wielding a chainsaw, too hungover to do this work and so accidentally cutting into his shinbone with the moving blade. I want you to see it: the type of guy that would not go to the doctor or the hospital for that enormous wound that bled and festered for the rest of his life. The type of guy who didn’t trust doctors so much so that he died of treatable cancer and liver failure over many years of painful suffering.

I want you to see how unexplainable it is: that he both loved us so much so that it seared his soul that he couldn’t do right by us, and also that he was so tortured that he could do nothing but kill himself, slowly, over the years of our short time together.

I want you to hear that bass gravel saying to me, “Go with your mother.” Even when it severed sharply and with finality all his ties with this world to do so. When all he wanted was for us to stay. When I begged him to say something else.

I want you to know that was 26 years ago. That, shortly after, they told me he was dead. That I was 11. And that I never stop missing my hand in his, or finding him yet again in a cold tub, unable to get out until he had finished the book, or helping him paint in the garage, or letting him tell me how to get ahead in life even though I had no idea what he was talking about, or the way he looked at me like I was perfect.

I need to feel like I’m not the only one who remembers. I need to remind myself through telling you. I have to know that he would be so proud of me, now, that he would love the people I love and that he knows that he was part of making this reality. That I never could have done it without him. That I’m still doing this for him. And that I will never stop loving him.

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