Hey Nineteen

A Letter To My Father

Writing a letter today feels a little on the nose. To the point that it feels forced. And you know how well I react when I feel forced into something. I can hear you now:

“Nobody could force you to do anything.”

Except, maybe the US Military. Okay, maybe not even them.

You were here when I woke up nineteen years ago. You were gone by the time I went to bed. Aside from that, it really was a day like any other.

The Chargers were playing the Broncos for the Sunday Night game and I was watching from Jupiter, Florida. I turned off my phone and made what was, in hindsight, a macabre joke about if someone calls to tell me somebody died they’ll still be dead in the morning.

My Chargers won. And, I still make that joke when I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. Which is always.

The things I never say about that day — the parts of it that get lost in the haze of gloom — I taught a little girl how to ride a bicycle. I swam in the ocean and a swimming pool in the same day. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I fell asleep smiling.

And you were still alive in California.

Except for what happened when I slept, this day was a good day.

It is so fucking weird to think of it that way, but having lived through all the other iterations of this day I have had a lot, A LOT of time to think about it.

November 19, 2006, aside from you dying at the end, was the kind of day Ice Cube might sing about.

Now, tomorrow is the anniversary of when my life changed for real, for real. I went to sleep in a world you still occupied. The only constant was still here.

Then I woke up.

The world has been a decidedly different place since waking up. My only constant was gone.

But that’s all stuff my therapist and I have spent time working through and now today (and tomorrow) feel much the same as every other day. I miss you on all of them regardless of where they fall on the calendar. And, like any other day, there are random moments when I may feel it more acutely. There are even those moments where I forget ever so briefly that you’re gone and when I remember again it’s almost like learning it for the first time. Almost.

Long before you died grief was a constant companion in my life. Now, well fuck, I feel like an old pro at this grief thing.

“No, it never really goes away.”

“Let yourself feel the things you’re feeling, it is perfectly normal.”

“Yes, even after all this time it makes perfect sense that it hurts out of nowhere sometimes”

Just a few of the sentences I have uttered to friends going through it. It’s all true. It’s all just so… fucking normal for me.

It’s had a funny effect on me, though. I am not at all afraid of my own death. I am going to die. That’s a certainty. So are you, dear reader. Hopefully not for a long time for either of us. But one day we won’t be here anymore and, if we were even halfway decent as humans, someone will miss us and even grieve our passing.

In the meantime I am trying to lean into the time I do have left. I am trying to love a little harder. I want desperately to be a better human — and more importantly to me, a better husband.

I suppose I could be a dick to my wife so that when I finally die she can be relieved my ass is gone. If you think about it, that really would be far more compassionate of me.

The alternative is that I love her with the whole of me for time I have left and, should I go before her, she’ll hurt quite a lot. That seems rather cruel.

Fucking irony, amiright?

Yeah, I think I am still going with the trying to be a better husband with the time I have left. Maybe one day I might be worthy of her.

I don’t remember the point of this letter. I just felt a sense of obligation to write something considering it’s that day.

I wish you were still here. But that’s true everyday.

on grief and loss