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Following the endorsements, title page, publisher's copyright, required permissions, and about the author, the dedication stands alone on page nine of my forthcoming memoir. It feels both stark and soft as I stare at it. Two words. Two simple words. Two simple words that assume the twinned burden of expressing my gratitude for the father whose large life shaped me, and my grief for the father whose early death broke me.
For Dad.
The last time I gave Dad something for Father's Day was in 1995, 178 days before he died of AIDS-related complications after living for 10 years with HIV circulating in his blood from a transfusion during open-heart surgery. To tell the truth, I don't remember what I actually gave him. A card, probably. The timeline blurs with the memories of two other significant events that beckoned my husband and me from our newly-married life in Baltimore, Maryland, to my parents' home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, sometime on or around that third Sunday in June.
- My younger brother's high school graduation for which he was valedictorian.
- The first and only time during his long season of illness that a medical crisis (a severe intestinal blockage that made it impossible for him to eat) landed Dad in the hospital.
The clashing emotions of celebration and trepidation that wrapped around those concurrent happenings have forever eclipsed any significant details of how I commemorated that final Father's Day with my beloved dad. What I do know is that nothing I did would have ever been enough.
A chasm of 27 Father's Days inhabits the space between then and now. Days I often wished would pass like any other day, but felt impossible to ignore thanks to the commercial pomp that demands festivity. Days that clawed at my grief wounds in particular ways when poignant images of dads and daughters inevitably caught my eye, once even prompting me to buy a card I'd never be able to send. Days that recaptured some sparks of joy (but never without the persistent tinge of sadness) when the births of our son and daughter made my husband a father deserving of celebration.
But on this 28th Father's Day since Dad died, I feel a shift.
In just under three months, the hard story I began writing 10 years ago about my memories of coping with the tragedy of Dad's illness, the loneliness and isolation of my family's experience, the complicated grief that followed Dad's death, and my journey to make sense of it all, will be published. With time, persistence, and a choice to set free the pain I'd quarantined for too long, this unwieldy and seemingly impossible project that began with small, uncertain pieces, has become something solid. A whole.
And in the act of crafting, my grief-broken pieces, like the tesserae of a mosaic, have shaped into a fragile wholeness too. I am no longer the lost daughter searching for her missing father. I've found him in the words that flood the pages of this book. His wisdom, his faith, his humor, his generosity, his complexity, his immeasurable strength, his all-too-human limitations. He's immortalized in all of it—the joys and sorrows—his brown eyes always attentive behind the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. I see the line between his brows cave in sometimes. Other times, deep creases dent his cheeks and a smile plays on his lips. His laughter rings. His anger spills. His love lingers. I feel his big hand fold over mine, holding me steady in this new, uncharted moment.
When my children were little, they'd labor over construction paper cards with primitive crayon drawings of remembered moments and scrawled messages of affection, proudly presenting them to my husband on Father's Day declaring, "Look, I made this for you." The making, I understand now, was not only for him, but also for them. A tangible action they could embrace to tell Chris the story of just how much he mattered in their lives.
This Father's Day, my forthcoming book feels like my version of those handmade cards. Yes, I wrote it for myself to understand what happened to my father, to my family, to me. To learn to carry this experience differently. To help others feel less alone in the hard silences of their experiences. But on page nine, two simple words center the lens on the story behind the making. For Dad.
