My dad’s gone. I’ve been trying to process this now for almost three weeks, and it still doesn’t quite make sense to me. I’m not sure how the world can exist without my dad in it. No one prepares you for how utterly weird it is to exist in a world when both your parents no longer do. No one can really prepare you for the depth of pain when the parent you were closest to is gone – nor can they prepare you for the level of exhaustion grief brings with it.
It’s been a year of loss. Last year, in June, my mom died. This February, my father-in-law passed away. We’re still reeling from that loss. My mother-in-law is in memory care, and on hospice, another loss, in a way. I’ve lost a few friends this past year as well. But the biggest, by far, has been losing my dad.
In 1997, my mom left my dad and me and moved to our family’s second, ranch, home. It was the first time I’ve seen my dad cry – and one of the only times I’ve seen my dad cry. I was 19. I came home from junior college that day to find the house nearly empty, save for my dad’s roll-top desk, my stuff, and some of my mom’s least favorite pots and pans.
I wrote this poem during that time:
Tuesday Wash Days
My father leaned farther over the beige
Laundry basket, his wrinkled hands
Wrapped around the blue
Cotton of his sweatshirt.
With one swipe of his hands,
He heaved it into the worn sepia
washer.
I pulled up a pair of blue jeans
from the beige basket, their denim
faded and dingy, worn from their
wearings. I zipped the
copper zipper folded them
In fourths and threw them
forth into the same hungry
washer.
Daddy looked at me:
“We are going to be okay without
Mom…We are going to do fine.”
I held back the words I have
seldom said to my father,
“I love you, Daddy,” and instead opened
my purple tie-dyed wallet.
I pulled out five quarters and
inserted them in the washer’s coin slot.
We sat next to each other,
silent.
Coping Through Writing
I’ve always been a writer – more than any other description of me, this is the one that most fits me. While I do work as a freelancer, it goes beyond that. I’ve been writing short stories since I was a child. I’ve often had a hard time expressing myself vocally, instead, opting to write about my feelings instead of talking about them. I don’t feel comfortable getting emotional in front of people unless I’m very close to them.
For a long while, I’d kind of moved away from writing and felt blocked by it. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s something I think my dad wouldn’t have wanted to set aside – ever. In fact, I wrote the above poem, originally, in a notebook while sitting next to my dad in that laundromat, in silence. I think we started talking about genetic engineering after that – I had a book I’d brought about it to read while we waited for the clothes to wash.
My dad was never much a reader, but I know he was super proud of not only the fact that I became a writer after wanting to be one as a kid, but also that I went so far with my education. My dad didn’t go to college – instead, he went into the Navy and then trade school. I’m the first person in my immediate family to not only attend college but graduate from college.
A few days after my dad died, I wrote the following poem. I will leave you with it. It’s as I wrote it the night I wrote it. At some point, I’ll go back and revise it, but I think it does a good job of capturing emotions.
One.
It’s five days after my dad died.
No four.
It feels like an eternity.
How does one just carry on when the people who
created them and raised them are just gone?
How do you walk when there’s a huge hole
torn out of your soul?
How do you breathe?
It’s four days after my dad died.
He was just gone.
How is someone just gone?
Where do they go?
Are they born anew somewhere else?
Are they an “as if it were them”
As Kapitan believed?
It’s 8 years since I last hugged my dad.
Capitalism is a shit thing.
Airfare is expensive.
Then when there’s money,
There’s also a novel virus.
The virus that took my dad.
The virus that took my husband’s dad.
The virus that took my mom.
The virus that almost took my child.
The virus that almost took me.*
It took one night.
He was fine.
The nurses said he was going to be discharged.
One night.
Everything changed.
Surprise! Said COVID.
I have one last thing to do.
And with that,
The next day,
My dad was gone.
Just one night.
One.
*My dad died from complications from COVID-19. My father-in-law contracted the virus in November 2022 and it sped up his decline from prostate cancer. My mom had lung failure after she contracted covid and never recovered. My oldest and I have had the virus multiple times and have dealt with long covid since. Perhaps the last two lines of that stanza are hyperbole, but it’s what I felt at the time when we went through it and it is what I felt at the time I wrote this draft of the poem. I felt it would be disingenuous to my emotions to remove those two lines from the stanza.
