Happy Father’s Day?

Greetings from a member of the dead dad’s club.

After my dad died, I wrote a series of essays collectively entitled “daddy’s girl: tales of grief and other human feelings.” As of now I have yet to share them with the wider public — likely because they’re far far too sad and deeply personal. But more because they’re too sad. When I sent them to my book agent, she didn’t respond to my email. She simply called my other agent to ask if I was okay? It was bleak. But so is grief. And days like today are bleak, and hard, and weird.

It’s my third Father’s Day without my dad and I began my day sobbing over missing him. It felt good to sob. Because all those tears are just misplaced love.

“Anyway, here’s wonderwall” aka the first essay I ever wrote about my dad’s death on the first Father’s Day I faced without him.

Love you, poppa.

Father’s Day 

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. My dad is dead, and because of it I feel like I have lost the anchor of my life. Describing my dad’s death and how it makes me feel seems impossible, mostly in that how I feel is ever changing. But also in that losing my dad feels so monumental that I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to describe it. Now all I have of him is the random string of memories of him that my jumbled ADHD brain holds and surfaces, the feeling I get when I think of him (mostly remembering what it felt like to hug him and be hugged), and this tiny polaroid of us that is sitting on my desk. It’s a picture of us in Greece. We went there four days after he had a heart attack because my dad is, was, and always will be a stubborn ass who doesn’t listen to anyone. That’s why he died, because he wouldn’t listen, and also because he was afraid to say he was scared which wasn’t his fault. 

My dad grew up in Cuba, a strange fact that I took for granted.  Being that both of my parents were immigrants, I never considered what it was like to live in and raise a family in a foreign land until I left to teach English in Korea for a year when I was twenty-two. I thought then about how strange it would be to stay in Korea forever and raise Korean children so different from the home I was raised in, and always feel like my head was in two places. Like my heart was split apart. I remember once asking my dad if he dreamed in spanish. From what I remember he said it was 50/50. He told me he did math in Spanish though. My abuela did math in Korean. I do math on a calculator because no one needs to learn how to do math anymore. That is  just a lie that math teachers tell us so they can keep having jobs. All that to say that there are parts of us that we can’t erase. Parts of us that are intrinsic to us, despite where we end up, we will always be a product, in some way, of how we were raised. And that’s what makes me miss and think about my dad. He was so annoying. Obsessed with family and obsessed with making sure I knew, and my sibling knew, that family was the most important thing in the world. And it is, but I fought him my whole life on it. 

One time we got into a fight about blood being thicker than water. My dad loved idioms, despite English being his second language, and him mainly getting them wrong. He was always going on and on about something, and mostly in the form of a saying, phrase, or some other word I can’t think of right and can’t seem to figure out how to help google help me figure it out. It’s annoying that all of those life lessons my dad went on and on about are now etched in stone. They are me, the part of me I won’t be able to shake now that he’s gone. He got the fucking last laugh, which drives me crazy, and also makes me smile, that I’ll never be able to stop thinking about him and how he raised me. I know part of him is happy too wherever he is. I know also that mostly he’s sorry. That was the first, last thing he said to me, the day I saw him in the ER for what would be the last time ever. I’m sorry. The phrase that I had fought for so hard my whole life arguing with a dad who always liked to be right. And yet with his last I’m sorry, all I had was “No, it’s okay, daddy. You don’t have to be sorry. Don’t worry about that now. Just get better.” They were about to ventilate him. He would die five days later from a disease that didn’t even exist a year ago. 

And so now I’m not sure what to do. Not sure how to bear the enormity of my life that is left ahead of me, if I’m lucky. I’m not sure how to bear the idea that if I live to be 90 ,or even 63, I will have lived longer without my dad than with him. Even now as I type this I am moaning, a sound that has escaped me many times over the last few months, a sound I don’t know where it comes from, that often takes me out of my grief and into the clouds for a moment. A strange out of body experience where I wonder why I am crying and moaning. Why in grief I have become such an animal. And wondering whether this is the most, or least, human, I’ve ever been. Which brings me back to the anchor, the lostness, the sort of non-existence that I am living now. It’s not hopeless, it just is. It feels like nothing and everything at the same time, which is why I have so many unread texts. I stop every time someone asks me how I am or asks me a question or to do something. Because all of the doing, examining, and answering seems so pointless now. So my brain just shuts off for a minute, disconnecting, it closes the blinds behind my eyes. “It’s okay, Ashley,  you can just check out.” 

My therapist was alarmed by my casual bleakness, which surprised me. It doesn’t seem bad, it just is. But I think people are alarmed because it’s nowhere near who I used to be. I was talking to one of my best friends the other day, a friend who frankly the minute after my dad died I haven’t talked to very much, but I was trying to describe in any way that made sense what my life feels like right now without sounding like I might be just seconds away from driving into the canyon I was driving through in Malibu. Then it came to me. “It feels like all the ambition has been sucked out of me. It disappeared all at once the exact moment my dad died.” Which was around 11:01ish pm on New Year’s Eve 2020. And it turns out I was 90% ambition before, or at least it feels that way. Because right now it feels like I’m just a shell of a human forced to stay alive in a big world that no longer makes any sense to me. Or at least sometimes it feels like that. Sometimes I get the relief of being present in a moment that is lovely and wonderful. Those usually involve my fiance, my cat, or my friends. The sunshine is usually present. In those moments I also think of my dad and my abuelo, mas alla del sol, as the old spanish hymn goes. 

In those moments I remember why my dad and my abuelo lived, and what they loved about their life and I know they would want me to go on enjoying mine, despite their not being able to be here with me. So I do. But mainly I just sit and wait and wonder what will come next. But not even with any real curiosity, more with a gentle understanding that whatever will come next will simply come. And then I smile because I know this is my dad’s last lesson for me. The same as the last line of his favorite movie, Meet Joe Black,  in which Brad Pitt plays Death coming to get Anthony Hopkins on his 65th birthday. At his party, after all the fun has been had and as close to goodbyes have been said to the ones he loved most dearly, Brad Pitt comes to lead him across the bridge to that next place. “What do we do next?” Anthony Hopkins’s daughter asks Brad Pitt who is no longer Death, but once again Joe, the human man whose body Death chose to inhabit during his time on earth, “It’ll come to us” he says. 

And I know that those are the words my dad wants me to remember, even though tomorrow’s Father’s Day and he’s no longer physically here. “What do I do now, dad? Now that you’re gone?” 

“It’ll come to you, Ashlita,” he whispers from wherever a soul whispers to the daughter that he loved, the daughter that he loves. And I close my eyes and lay my head against his comically large chest. “Okay, poppa. Okay.”