It doesn’t feel like December. Misty rain, here and then gone, seems to cover everything in a somber haze that’s quite appropriate for a grey day like today. Where is the snow? The red cheeks and the hot cocoa? The fingers held to the fire as Christmas music plays and your family laughs in the background, all merriment? I miss my family so much. Dad would have hated a day like today. He definitely hated winter, but he could appreciate it in the joyful month of December. He would have said he’d been cheated, and grumbled about the possible snow in January or February – “when nobody even wants it!” Sometimes I miss him so much it’s hard to breathe. Grief is an odd thing, drowning you and then receding just enough to let you breathe. I miss our old house in a cute neighborhood in Ohio, with the cathedral ceilings in the living room, the loft upstairs that my sister Alexia and I shared, the lilac bushes in my parents bedroom, and the natural light bouncing off the prisms and stained glass in the windows. We always had to get THE BIGGEST Christmas tree, and it took 3 men to get it into the house and upright. And then we’d have to use a ladder to decorate it. It was a pain, absolutely… but god, it looked beautiful once it was up. Magical, almost. I miss those days.
Scrolling through old photos today, my heart aches. It’s hard to believe sometimes that I’ll never have another holiday with my dad. That I’ll never hear him cursing up a storm about what a pain in the ass decorating that tall tree is! I’ll never get to shriek when he steals a cookie I’ve decorated for myself, and hear him make his evil laugh when I scold him.
Some days it feels like he’s just in the other room, and I’ll go in to find him napping in his chair, probably with a Home and Garden magazine on his lap or an auto auction on the TV. Or I’ll see an old Dodge truck and want to call him to “pay up” because I won the bet again. He was such an incredible father, and 29 years was not enough time with him. He would do anything to make “his girls” feel better, even if that meant watching Never Been Kissed again. When I was a moody, snarling teenager, daddy would take me out in his truck and let me chain smoke while we sang along to music (and kicked my ass with his superior musical knowledge). He gave the best hugs. And he was always drawing in lost and broken people, to heal or to at least soothe them. Both he and mom were so good at that. I even miss how much of a smart-ass he was, or how he would hum in his obnoxious way, continuously, just to get a rise out of us. No one had a more kind and loving father than my sister and I. No one had a better and more loving relationship than he and my mom.
It’s a jarring and unhappy realization that when I make new friends, they will never get to meet him. I’ll have to sculpt him into being with my words, scraps of photos and letters, until they get some kind of picture of him. But I can’t bring to life his mischievous smile, or his humor. I can’t begin to describe his wonderful personality. They won’t understand when I talk about how we’d go looking for tornadoes, and how he raced us through the ravine in the back of his Brat. They’d probably be horrified at the fact that he accidentally plowed into the back of the garage in that same car – oops! No one was hurt, and now we can all laugh about it, but anyone hearing it would probably think he was a bit insane. And so what if he was? Aren’t we all, a bit? I joke constantly that I am my father in female form – but if I can be half the person he was, I’d be proud as hell. No, he wasn’t perfect. But who wants perfection, anyway?
I’ve never known anyone as funny, maniacal, caring and wonderful as my father. He was a trip. And I hope he knows that I’d never regret being like him in the slightest. It’s the darkness, the Night of the Soul, that makes us appreciate the Dawn that much more.
I didn’t know this would be about Daddy, and I didn’t know I’d be sitting on a bench crying before work. But it feels right. I love you, daddy. I’ll steal some cookies for you, and give everyone a bit of grief in your honor. We always miss you, and always love you.
Elisabeth Writing 