Dear Dad:
On this day, an incomprehensible decade ago, the finality
of your fate feverishly launched my heart and soul into a fictitious,
unidentifiable realm that is host to the unfathomable. A place that is riddled
with grief and plagued by permanence. A place littered with forcible acceptance
and daunted with unattainable peace of mind. A place that has been harboring a
menagerie of back-burner feelings that have ultimately festered my life into an
everlasting existence of magnificent sadness.
As I reflect on our last, and final, conversation, I can’t
help but wonder what it was like, for you, the lead in my life’s biggest
tragedy, to be dying right before your daughter’s eyes. You were a 58-year-old
terminally ill man, lying on your deathbed. The strongest man I knew was skin
and bones, weak, and feeble. So sick, so tired, so vulnerable. Your illness was
ready to claim you, forcing you to surrender and forcing me to prepare myself
for the impending realities of your afterlife.
The aftershocks of grief are what make death so challenging.
They are fragments of memories, flickers of what was, and glimpses of what
could have been. They often hit unheralded, unexpected and unbridled. They gain
momentum like a tsunami, and there’s no way of knowing when they will
dissipate. They do not announce themselves, nor can you prepare for their
unpredictable repercussions.
I don’t ever think I’ll ever accept your absence from my
life, and I have your stubbornness to thank for that. Your physical presence has
been replaced by reoccurring numeric sequences, lyrics of a song, the smell of
cigars, the sight of Lake St. Clair, and the sporadic visual encounter with a
cardinal. You are everywhere, yet you are nowhere to be found.
I’ll see you in my dreams,
jax
