August 30, 1985.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forty-one years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is strange what time does to grief. People like to say grief gets easier, and maybe it does for some. For me, grief hasn\u2019t. In some ways, it has become harder\u2026not with the sharp, unbearable pain of those first years after losing my buddy, but with the accumulation of a life I never got to share with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is the part no one really tells you about losing someone young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don\u2019t only grieve the memories you had. You also begin grieving all the memories you never got to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are so many things I want to ask you now, Dad. Things I wasn\u2019t old enough, curious enough, or wise enough to ask during the too-short time I had you as my first great champion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want your perspective on people and all their complicated behaviors. I want to know how you managed the public every day at work without completely losing your mind. I want to know whether you questioned life the way I do now. Did you ever wonder what the hell we are all doing here? Did you question why we arrive, love people so fiercely, lose them, keep going, and somehow build a life inside it all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would love to sit across from you now, as the woman I have become, and hear what you would say. Becoming that woman has required me to move through things I never imagined I would face. Losing you was my first lesson in that. Life taught me far too early that the people we love can disappear and the world will keep moving anyway. Maybe that is why, when life gets hard now, my relationship with fear and with doing hard things is complicated. I know I can let it consume me, but I also know that facing what frightens me can either destroy me or define me, and sometimes the only way to discover which is to walk straight through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Losing you still feels like a wound that never fully healed. I have just learned to live around it. And all these years later, something will catch its edge: a song, a smell, one of the boys doing something that reminds me of you, or a hard day when I want nothing more than to ask, Dad, what would you do<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suddenly, 41 years collapse\u2026the wound opens, and for a moment I am eleven again. And yet, when I think of you, those big questions give way to something much simpler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That mischievous grin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your brown-and-tan Chevy truck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Def Leppard blasting through the speakers\u2014Hysteria<\/em>, Love Bites<\/em>\u2014the two of us driving around, unaware that those ordinary, silly moments would someday become sacred to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And God, Dad, I wish you could see Cole and Cody now. They aren\u2019t boys anymore. They are grown men, though the three of you together, with your mustaches, beards, questionable humor, and all that mischief, would undoubtedly act like twelve-year-olds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can see you golfing with Cody, showing him your swing while conveniently leaving out the part where, after a particularly bad shot, you might throw the club and send it sailing into the sand on those Tuesday golf league nights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can see you out in the garage with Cole, puttering around, fixing something that probably wasn\u2019t broken in the first place, talking shop, debating the best way to do things, and deciding how to aim that bottle rocket in the tall glass Pepsi bottle away from Evie\u2019s house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then seeing the three of you at the ranch – rifles, a campfire, and Coors Lights in hand – bullshitting and plotting a prank someone else would inevitably clean up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently, behaving was never in the bloodline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And oh, would you get a kick out of Tim\u2019s newest toy\u2014a 1971 Ford Bronco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baby blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can already hear you giving him hell about the color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the image of the two of you climbing into that Bronco and cruising up the California coast together absolutely sets my heart on fire. I can see it so clearly that for a moment it almost feels like a memory instead of something that never got the chance to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe that is grief after all these years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An entire parallel life running alongside the one I am actually living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An ordinary Tuesday afternoon when I might have called just to ask, \u201cDad, what do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stories you would have told Cole and Cody about me as a kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The beers with Tim, shooting the shit over work and whatever else came up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The golf rounds and rifle lessons with Cody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hours in the garage and fireworks with Cole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The teasing. The pranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The growing older, maybe even growing up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching you know my boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watching them know you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is so much life I wanted you to see. So much life I wanted to share with you. And beneath all the reflection, and all the ways I have learned to carry your absence, one simple truth remains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I just want to hug my dad again. To bury my face in your flannel shirt, smell the Old Spice from that white bottle in the cupboard by the bathroom, and be ten again, just for one second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not in this lifetime. Even after forty-one years, that realization can knock the wind out of me. Maybe that is why I take so little for granted now. I know how abruptly an ordinary day can become the dividing line between before<\/em> and after<\/em>. I know there are hugs we assume we will have again, conversations we believe can wait, and questions we never think to ask until the person who could answer them is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I pay attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I love people hard while they are here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I say the thing I might otherwise hold back, make the call, take the trip, sit a little longer at the table, and remember that none of us has been promised another ordinary Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But damn, Dad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wish like hell I could sit next to you again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climb into that old Chevy and turn up Def Leppard, or better yet, sit by the campfire and ask you everything I never knew enough to ask, and see that mischievous grin looking back at me, that sparkle in your hazel eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until then, you remain where you always have… in the memories, the music, the stories, the boys, the mischief, the questions I still ask, and in the woman I became after losing you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still here, still my dad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" August 30, 1985. Forty-one years. It is strange what time does to grief. People like to say grief gets easier, and maybe it does for some. For me, grief hasn\u2019t. In some ways, it has become harder\u2026not with the sharp, unbearable pain of those first years after losing my buddy, but with the accumulation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,46,72,32,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-death","category-healing","category-identity","category-living","category-personal-contemplation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prolificpreambles.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}