A father loved and missed
The last Father’s Day I spent with my dad was two summers ago. It was a blistering June in Phoenix, where sweat was as ubiquitous as sadness. I recall writing him an effusive letter and baking him his favorite lemon cake with my grandmother’s recipe, although two years later, I don’t recall much of what I wrote or if the chemo treatments he was undergoing allowed him to enjoy eating that cake. We probably spent a portion of the day as we spent most of our days: curled up on his bed in the back of the rented house, trying to escape the heat wave outside. There, we played game after game of chess, I read aloud to him, and we talked about music or his experiences hitchhiking across America before I was born. It was a tradition that we would continue even when he entered the Mayo Clinic just a few blocks away, and again at the hospice center where he died one month and 13 days after our last Father’s Day together.
This Father’s Day, I will likely be overwhelmed by the onslaught of cards and commercials, even the ones centered around buying power tools or the entirety of Home Depot. A few weeks ago, for example, an engraved hammer on Etsy set me weeping. It’s ridiculous because my dad was a bookish engineer who preferred National Geographic subscriptions to football memorabilia and Thai cookbooks to belt sanders. During his life, I never felt pressured to celebrate Father’s Day with the kinds of gifts one found on the Home Shopping Network. Even so, I’m sure the prevalence of these items as we approach Father’s Day on Sunday will give me that same ache, that acute desire for just a little more time — minutes, even — to talk to him, to tell him once more how grateful I am for the life we got to share and to say how much I’ll still be loving him and missing him in five, 10, 20 or more years.
I also know it doesn’t take a day that celebrates paternity to make me miss him. There are a million everyday instances when my chest pangs with his absence — when I write, for instance, or when I read Shakespeare or watch old episodes of 30 Rock or see a particularly lovely sunrise. More difficult is observing other teenage girls with their dads, or healthy grandfathers surrounded by their broods, because that’s when I feel the weight of knowing I don’t have that anymore. I won’t ever have that again. Talking to friends for whom Father’s Day is an entirely different ordeal — because their dads missed the mark or were abusive or not present in their lives — I feel a grim, aching sort of gratification that I had a father who was and still is my backbone.
I know I will not be the only one this Father’s Day who feels orphaned amid the dizzying array of Hallmark cards. For everyone experiencing the holiday without a dad, I hope you know it is OK to avoid social media and Father’s Day commercials. It’s OK to want to take time for remembrance. It’s OK to cry when accidentally confronted by the love endemic to seemingly everyone else’s experiences on that day. Mostly, I hope someone out there this Sunday makes you feel the same emotion I feel when I revisit the photo albums and every letter my dad wrote me. What wells up through the eyes he gave me, through the hands he passed on, through the backbone he helped build, is a love so pure and profound that now, without him, it stings.