Dear Dad –
It’s been a while since I’ve written to you.
That’s a good thing, and I want you to know that I’m ok.
When I feel people are around me, I tend to write to them less, and for the past year since you’ve been gone, you’ve never been far from my mind. In some ways, the love I have had for you has grown. Somehow, you are with me always, and that’s the most surprisingly comforting discovery I’ve made since last August. I didn’t know it could be like that.
On the morning of your funeral service there was a deluge of torrential rain. The summer had been so sunny and beautiful that this weather felt suddenly shocking, albeit fitting. As we entered the church, I wasn’t sure how I would make it through the day, but as we walked up the aisle and approached the altar, a feeling of calm came over me. Your picture was there, beside the Wedgwood piece that Mom had selected to hold your ashes – a piece that matched the Wedgwood urn where Gram was. Around this was an arc of white flowers, like some healing moonlight garden. It was such a scene of peace and calm that I would look at it whenever the parade of people exhausted me. I had never imagined that there would be any calm or beauty in losing a loved one, yet that’s what I felt for most of the service.
It was near the end when I realized that this would be the last time our family would be together. You, Mom, Paul and I had spent so many Sunday mornings in church together, so many Christmas Eves and Easter Sundays, and now here we were seeing you off on the final morning we would be intact as a family. That’s when I started crying, just as we had to walk past all the people and leave you in the hands of a funeral director.
The rain had stopped. Mom and Andy sat in the front seats of the car while I sat alone in the back. We would go to the columbarium next, but this is where it felt like I was saying goodbye, because I didn’t think we would ever be together as a family again. Our time at your resting place was blessedly brief, and then we went back to Mom’s house. After changing out of my black suit in the room where you transitioned out of this world, I didn’t know quite how to proceed. Yet family and friends trickled in, and what was now only Mom’s house was suddenly becoming Mom’s home, and still I felt you with us. We were all there – in fact there were more of us than ever before, all crammed into this cozy space, and spilling out into the backyard. All the love we felt for you was still there, perhaps even more resonant when surrounded by all the other people who loved you in your life. Even after everyone left, and in all the days that followed, whenever Mom and Paul and I found ourselves together, you were somehow still with us.
I suppose that’s why I don’t write to you as much as I did when you were here – I still feel you with me, closer than ever, even if you’ve been gone for a year. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss you, and maybe it’s just some mental trick that keeps me from sliding into despondent paralysis, but I genuinely believe our loved ones don’t ever leave us, they simply exist in different ways – in the making of a batch of asado, in a Harry Belafonte song, in the planting of a tomato – in all the ways you were a father to me.
I love you Dad.
