you’re going. “it doesn’t make you a bad daughter if you don’t,” mom let you know a week ago, but the thought of staying home makes something ugly twist in your gut. shame, maybe, or the fact that you're his only daughter. his oldest child.
he only ever wanted someone to sit with him, you learn after he’s gone. you'll spare his grave a few minutes.
so you go, even if it’s a forty-minute drive.(click-replace:"a forty-minute drive")[a four hour drive] (click-replace: "a four hour drive")[an eight hour flight] (click-replace: "an eight hour flight")[going to [[kill you]]]
someone has to.the day it happened, you lost power at 3:42 in the morning.
it was dark and you didn’t say goodbye - you had to get to work. you walked past his room, distinctly void of the constant hum of his CPAP, and called goodbye to mom.
you sent her a text at 1:32 that afternoon, a pretty cover of eleanor rigby. she showed up at work with your little brother and a grief counselor from the hospital in tow an hour later.
you'd argued with him the night before. the last words he ever heard from you were ugly, barbed.
“it doesn’t make you a bad daughter,” you whisper to yourself years later. your apology was planned out. you were going to ask if he wanted to watch a TV show he liked.
the windstorm that night was the worst you’ve ever [[heard]].you haven’t told anyone this before.
you started having nightmares after it happened.
they only ever featured three things: the [[wind]], the [[cemetery]], or [[sobbing]].you studied abroad the spring after, and all you could think about were the stories you would’ve brought back to him.
the maritime museum. staying across from the largest concrete church in the world. being surprised about how flat everything is, even with the mountains in the distance. taking pictures of all of the street murals (and cats) you see. getting mistaken for a local by other tourists twice in the same day. seeing a whale. going to the harbor to see exactly one half of the two-boat navy.
finally getting to explore a little bit more of the world and loving it.
on your birthday, the day before you left, you facetimed your mom from the top of a mountain hoping that she loved it too.
you know he [[would’ve->cemetery]].it’s all incredibly uniform, you think for the thousandth time. veteran cemeteries are, were designed to be, but it’s jarring.
you drive past the solemn greeting of the flags at the entrance, follow the road along all of the neatly exposed teeth of the other graves. you can't bring yourself to smile back.
after almost missing the left turn like always, you're finally here.
you want to [[cry]] (and you’ve been trying not to since the flags.) the third time he takes you to a movie by yourself (after veggie tales and the hunger games, years apart) you see the book thief. you read the book, had cried all the way home on a road trip because of it, but all he knows is that it’s set during world war two.
that was your secret weapon for getting him to agree to go in the first place.
after, when you’re crying in the car and haven’t even left the parking lot to go home, he seems to be at a loss. he never really knew what to do with your tears.
“i wasn’t expecting it to be that sad.” he hands you the fast food napkins he keeps stashed in his center console.
“i told you it was going to be.” you blow your nose very matter-of-factly. you cried all the way through the movie, holding his hand in a vice grip the entire time. he didn’t have to look at you then.
he does now.
he fidgets with his wedding ring, but mom’s not here to take point.
“i know, but i still just...[[wasn’t expecting it->cemetery]].”the day it happened, you didn’t cry at all.
a few days after his service, you find his place marker. he doesn't have a headstone yet and won’t for a few weeks, but he is across the sidewalk from a little lake. there’s ducks in the distance.
he would’ve made a joke about having to die to finally get waterfront property, you point out to your mom. her sad, fond little, “i know,” rings in your memory and will for the rest of your life.
your brother doesn’t say anything, but he looks away.
you still don’t cry.
what do you have to cry about?
you’re the [[oldest]]. you didn’t see it happen, your mom did. at least he saw you graduate. your relationship with him was complicated, to put it mildly.
what do you have to cry about?
you have a routine you’ve gotten into after you park, before you brave the walk over.
you have to scroll a while back through the pictures in your phone to find it, but when you finally do, you press play.
it’s a video your mom took of the two of you dancing at your uncle’s second wedding. you’re both laughing as he twirls you, as you attempt to twirl him - as if he would ever let you - and you both make faces at the camera before the video ends.
you would give anything to be able to hear the sound of [[his voice]] over the music. to be able to [[hug him]] again.
you get out of your car and shut the door a little harder than you meant to, spooking the elderly woman a few rows over.he worked graveyard shift as a hospital security guard before. whenever he could answer your call as you were walking across campus late at night, he would.
he’d listen as you told him about your day, out of breath and tired, and would always end with, “proud of you, lou. [[goodnight->the grave]].”
your "bye, i love you"s to your mom always ring a little more desperate these days. when she doesn't say it back you repeat yourself, a little louder, until she does. you make sure you have a voicemail she left you saved on your phone.
you don't have any from him, and you have to stop yourself from begging your brother to let you hear his more than once.you catch a peek of the bright red and white of his old shanahan jersey every time you rifle through your closet. you've been meaning to make it to a wings game, and you will. eventually. maybe. you wonder if it'll feel hollow without him there.
the old flannel you stole from him when you left for school only comes out when missing him gets particularly bad.
mom keeps a lot of his old t-shirts in the drawer of his nightstand to make a quilt out of eventually. they’ve been sitting there since she went through and cleared everything six months ago, but none of you have pushed particularly hard to get it made.
you’d all want to keep it. how do you decide who gets to keep [[which pieces->the grave]] of the person you’re grieving?
you're by yourself for the most recent visit. that’s how it typically goes, now - you moved closer, they didn’t.
his grave is an incisor among the rest, and you crouch in front of it. //beloved father and husband, forever in our [[hearts]].//
you’re going to throw up. the first and only time you can remember seeing him cry was when your childhood dog started deteriorating after a string of health scares.
copper was a sweet, tolerant boy, a golden retriever, and the only dog you’d ever had. playing him your music box to ease his pain seemed like the right thing to do at the age of 12, and you’d looked over to see your dad silently crying.
he’d turned away from you then.
at the age of 22, you visited him in the hospital. he'd just received his diagnosis and you didn’t have a music box this time, but you did have a letter. you drew a lighthouse for him, wrote your heart on your sleeve and that you loved him, and it felt silly at the time.
years later, you [[turned away->leaving]] when your mom asked you if you wanted to keep the letter as a memento.
you were lucky enough that he helped you get your first car in high school: a tiny little nissan.
he'd told you it was at the dealership waiting for you, and that he'd gotten a good deal on it.
years later, when you're finally braving the task of figuring out what paperwork you should keep and what can get thrown away, you come across the hundred-page packet he put together of carfax printouts. your versa is long gone, but its safety ratings are circled twice-over and his comments are scrawled in the [[margins->leaving]].there’s geese in the distance, and their shit is all over the ground. you think about cleaning the grass around his headstone, but there’ll just be more later.
instead you put the flowers in their cone and make sure they won’t blow over before standing to leave.
this past summer added two more cemeteries to your address book. you’ll make your way to them eventually, and to even more in the future. (when does it [[end?]])you look at his grave one last time before turning away. (there’s your answer.)
the walk back to your car is quick. you’ve only been here for about ten minutes and you have places to be, but you sit for a minute to wonder if leaving has actually gotten easier or if you're already bracing for the next visit.
as you pull back into the road, you think about turning on a [[playlist]], or maybe [[calling mom]].two years later your mom calls you into her room while she’s new year’s cleaning.
before copper, dad had another golden named princess. sweet, a little stupid, and a frequent enjoyer of her own poop, dad had a framed set of pictures of her in his backyard that mom asks if you want to keep.
gut instinct is yes. he cared, why wouldn’t you?
but princess was before you, before mom. you didn’t know him then. that was a life that isn’t yours to mourn.
that’s when the tears start. it would just be clutter, but it feels like more. you don’t want it and that feels like a betrayal.
and that’s okay, you’re learning. “it doesn’t make you a bad daughter.”
instead, you tell him about everything he’s missed.
your new job, your new roommates, graduating college, moving downstate all by yourself, how proud you are of your brother graduating high school and how hard he’s working at college (another year to go), about your mom’s trivia nights with her friends, about the birthdays and christmases and milestones he’s missed.
about how you wish you’d caught his symptoms earlier. (click-replace: "how you wish you’d caught his symptoms earlier")[how lonely your mom is. how lost you and your brother are feeling] (click-replace: "how lonely your mom is. how lost you and your brother are feeling")[how bad you miss him] (click-replace: "how bad you miss him")[how awful you feel when you’re relieved he’s gone]
when you visited for his first birthday after, mom recommended you put a [[penny]] or a [[pebble]] on the grave. “something to leave behind,” she told you. “to let him know you stopped by.”
you want to pour him out a can of his favorite beer and leave the tab instead.when you got home after they broke the news, your phone and the four pages that held his top 300 playlist were the first things you grabbed. alphabetically, one by one, you added each of those 300 songs to a spotify playlist while sitting in his favorite chair.
the wind was screaming outside. your brother and mom were sitting on the couch wrapped in blankets. it took you almost forty-five minutes.
you ask him for advice sometimes, hoping that whatever shuffles through your car speakers next is his answer for whatever is troubling you that day.
you've never told anyone that, either.