Dear Dad

Dear Dad, 

I miss you. I miss you in this brief moment, meeting your eyes in the old picture of you on the refrigerator door. You’re wearing your Guns n’ Roses Lies t-shirt and smiling crookedly. You’re right there, held up by a souvenir magnet from a weekend getaway I don’t really remember. 

The truth is, I don’t really remember you either. When I focus hard, I can surface incomplete memories of our walks around Spring Valley. I can see you on the living room futon, laughing at the Flip Wilson show on TV Land. You becoming upset when I let the freshly cleaned laundry touch the floor while folding. I can see you on the blue recliner, slicing pieces off of a block of cheese and eating them slowly. Sitting on the same recliner with a package of frozen peas atop your pants after your vasectomy surgery, wincing in pain. 

If I don’t focus though, and I don’t linger on the old refrigerator photos, you are not quite here. Not in flesh or in memory.

I work. I make a plan to visit a friend. I go to the gym. Life continues forward as it does. Days roll into months, months into days, and suddenly it’s been twelve years since I last saw you. With each passing year, drumming up the memories of our time together becomes more difficult: moments held up by magnets in my kitchen, but with little recollection of the reality that was pictured. I can see in them, though, that we are smiling, and I know that we were happy at the time. 

I wonder sometimes how life would be different if you stuck around a little longer. I wonder if you’d ever have moved back to San Diego. If you would still have the same recliner and how you would have managed with a smartphone. Would you ever have listened to a podcast? Would you still have a disdain for cats even now that I have two? Would we have gotten closer with time, as has happened with mom? Would you be pushing for grandchildren, or would you not worry about that so much? 

I can say confidently, though, that you would be proud. I know this because you were proud of me before, when you were here still and I was much younger. You were proud of me before I graduated college, and before I figured out how to live a life of my own as an adult. I know you would think I was beautiful, just as you did then. And I know you’d tell me regularly so I wouldn’t forget. I know you would love me. You’d love me wholeheartedly and tell me often. You’d say, “Have I told you lately that you’re beautiful and I love you?”  The answer would be yes, but I’d still be happy to hear it again, just as I would be way back then.

I know that living through Allen’s recent health scare would have been very difficult for you, as you loved him equally so. When I thought we might lose Allen, it was as if I was going to lose you again too. He and I will chat on the phone,  and he’ll often make a reference to something you said or did when we were kids. Maybe I’ll remember. But maybe I won’t, and like the magnets on my fridge, he’s holding the memory now, keeping you here a little longer still. I’m thankful for that. 

And I’m thankful for these refrigerator pictures. Memory or not, I know you were here. You lived through your own sequence of days that rolled into months that rolled into years. I’m lucky that a few of ours got to overlap. 

Until our next refrigerator visit,

Emma