My dad died three years ago today.
It’s a day that’s fallen into a pattern, in its third year of remembrance. I start to feel a weird level of anxiety in the week or two before, usually just after Thanksgiving, not immediately aware of the source. My mind, seeking answers, always seeking answers and reasons and causes, starts to spin and spiral. Am I sick? Broken? Is something wrong? Until I remember what is on the horizon.
I try not to think about it. Push the thoughts of it back and away, under and beneath. Cover them with business. With work, with reading, with projects and learning. Pile everything tangible and substantial and ephemeral on top until I can’t see nor feel nor sense it. And yet it moves.
In the first months after I didn’t know what to do with myself. My father wasn’t a Cleaver or a Cunningham, or even a Tanner. Not a stereotypical TV dad. He was an interstitial presence in my life. There, then gone. Here again. Gone again. I saw him in chunks of time.
Even when I lived with him in my twenties, as I relocated my life to try and find what I thought was missing, he was there and gone. Some part of me keeps expecting him to appear again. To come home from some three year trip, smelling of airplane fumes and leather and overhead bins. To appear out of the cold, swathed in cigarette smoke.
I didn’t know what to do with my Dad. I don’t know that he ever wanted to be a father, necessarily. His relationship with me wasn’t as a son so much as a friend. And yet we sound alike. Think alike. Talk alike and move alike. He was there and gone, but never left. He was bound into who I was. Who I am.
When I went back to school for the second time, trying to learn who I was by learning more about the world, I studied English. I’ve lived much of my life trying to fill the gaps in the world with words and stories, tales from others to live their lives within my own. And I’ve written some too. Mostly short works. Some starts at longer things. But in all of them, I seem to come back to the same themes. Fathers and sons. Fathers and sons. All my stories are, overtly or subtextually, about the relationships between fathers and sons.
He’s been gone three years, and he’ll be gone as many years as I have left here myself, and I’m certain I’ll keep looking. Keep expecting him. Keep writing about that space between. Fathers and sons. And though I miss him, and I always will, I’ll always be building him back up in my mind, in my words, and through my fingers and into the world. A curl of breath and life and smoke made man. My ephemeral, ethereal father. Always coalescing again.