A Collage of Memories
The bits of my father that linger around me
The other day my daughter pulled out her oil paints for the first time. My dad bought them for her on her birthday a year or two ago.
The filter light is flashing on the fridge right now and I remember my dad and I struggling to screw it free the last time it needed to be changed.
The faucet in the downstairs bathroom that I use multiple times a day my dad installed during one of his visits. We shopped for it together at Home Depot.
I regularly pass by Jeeps on the road, noticing their colors, knowing that he could tell me their exact names. Snazzberry. Firecracker Red. Hella Yella.
There seems to be an unspoken rule in the house that no one can be the banana when playing Boomerang Fu, as this was the character Dad played when joining us for family night.
We still use his Disney+ account. I’m not sure how it still works as it’s certainly not being paid for anymore. There is a profile for him in our Netflix account. I haven’t yet brought myself to delete it.
A phone with his number sits beside my workspace and rings on occasion. Next to it is his actual phone (now disconnected) that until recently we couldn’t break into. The former one I tend not to answer as by now the calls are either spam or banks looking for past due payments. Sorry folks, you will have the be patient. Probate and all that.
There’s a spot in the hall upstairs where my dad would solicit a hug before bed when he was living here. I can picture his arms opening and hear the little noise he would make when he squeezed me tight.
There are unfinished drugs piled in the laundry room awaiting transport to a drug take back location. I only recently carried down a pile of folded linens from the bed my dad was in that sat next to those drugs for months. Within that pile is a small quilt given by the hospital that I don’t know what to do with.
In the upstairs hall there is a razor he ordered for himself. My husband says he will use it, but I have yet to move it into our bathroom.
Most days my daughter and I — sometimes all four of us — walk a mile along the “Grampa Loop” that my husband mapped out when Dad was visiting and needed a walking loop. My dad had found that walking a mile every day helped keep the knee he had had surgery on pain free and mobile.
The guest bedroom still has an unmade bed, his laptop on the dresser, and his ashes on a makeshift shrine I erected on top of the dog grooming table. It also has a walker in the closet that he stood at saying “hmm” when his brain forgot how to tell his legs to walk.
There is a peace lily (still flowering) sent as condolence by the other side of the family which is sitting next to another peace lily the same family sent when my step-mother passed just two years before.
A part of me is grateful to have all of these reminders; that a part of him will live on in this house. Another part wishes I weren’t surrounded by them; forced into grief over and over again. A third part pretends that he is simply back at his home in California. A home he was able to enjoy for too short a time.
It is unfair that in the end of both my father’s and my step-mother’s lives their minds were not their own. Hers lost to Alzheimer’s and his to cancer.
It is unfair that for my siblings and I one set of parents is gone. The headstone with both their names on it represents the cruelty that life can bring.
I fear that I will forget to pack his ashes when we travel with them back to Vermont to bury them beside his wife. Or that I will forget them on the plane, unused to putting things in the overhead bin.
I fear it will all be too much: his Jeep friends flying in to say goodbye, the guns firing or the flag placed in my hands, the tears of everyone present.
I also know the tears will be healing. And I know that given the value of humor in my dad’s life, there will be laughter too.
I have spent multiple days writing this. The first day I cried the whole way through and these memories walked with me throughout my day. The next day I numbly edited. Another day this made me smile.
Grief is a curious thing. It is unpredictable and often silent. By silent, I mean that I’ve convinced myself that, after a time, it is no longer acceptable to break down in tears over the loss. So, I carry my grief in silence or save it for the shower or solo walks or my husband’s shoulder.
I wonder how long the memories of his last days in this house will haunt me. I eagerly await the day that the good memories will take up more prominent space and diminish the bad.
For now I find hope in looking at the picture above. As I see my dad walking hand in hand with his wife away from me, I imagine their minds their own, their bodies free from pain, enjoying their happily ever after.
