8 years
And for most of those 8 years, it feels good to think about him, even though it still hurts.
I guess I wrote this for myself, but I’ll post it in case it helps others somehow.
Since 2017 I go to a weird space from May 11 to July 10. May 11 was my dad’s birthday, Father’s Day is in early June, and July 10 is the day he died. So each year, I ride an emotional roller coaster for a quarter. Sad he’s not still around. Happy he didn’t have to suffer through seeing Trump elected, COVID (which would have almost certainly killed him had he not had the ultimate immunity of being already dead), the fall of Roe, genocide in Gaza, his empathy cutting him deeply as he saw others suffering needlessly. Curious what he would think of various societal, and personal, developments he’s missed out on. Sad again because of a song, a scene in a show, a flyer for CPR training (you should learn CPR, it saves lives, but not his). Guilty because would he have wanted the life he would have had if the CPR had worked? (He wasn’t taking questions in the moment). Relieved he didn’t drop in the condo with my mom and have her fighting for him alone. Judgemental of whether I am doing the right things to remember him, and am I doing them enough? Thankful that due to compartmentalization, self preservation, or forgetfulness, I have never involuntarily seen him on the floor inside my front door again. And for most of those 8 years, it feels good to think about him, even though it still hurts.
It’s also a time where the memory of maybe my most difficult conversation with him floats back up.
Years earlier, he had a persistent infection in his foot, made worse and more complicated by decades of living with diabetes. He had a surgery and knew going in they might have to amputate but I was holding on to hope that this would fix things without going that far. I don’t know why exactly, but it was super important to me, maybe because I knew it would be important to him, that I be there to tell him they had to amputate his foot when he woke up. I thought he’d be groggy and confused, would he remember he was even in the hospital? He hated being in the hospital. The doctor had warned us his brain would still feel the limb, but might also feel pain in the foot that was not really there. Fuck you, phantom foot, he had enough actual pain to deal with.
It was a lot of waiting while he slept or whatever you do when you’re still under anesthesia. Playing out the possible conversations in my mind. But when he woke up, he just asked “What happened?” What happened, I learned that day, has approximately 1 billion potential meanings, which my brain now furiously sifted through trying to understand the question so I could answer without making whatever he didn’t understand worse. What happened, why are you here? What happened, why am I in the hospital? What happened during the surgery I know I had and remember the possible outcomes of? Where’s my fucking foot?
I started basic and talked through the recent history, getting to the surgery and telling him they had to amputate but they were very happy with how it had gone and his remaining leg would be well suited for his future prosthetic. I honestly don’t know if that took 2 minutes or 20 minutes. I don’t know how I kept it together. Maybe because it was important for him to get the information, he deserved to understand what had happened to him. It seemed like he understood, though he was still very tired and groggy. I asked him if he was ok if I stepped out for a minute. He was.
I got as far as the hallway and the compartments ruptured. Like Titanic vs the iceberg levels of breach. He had said maybe 10 words, I had said 50? 500? Maybe 5,000. At the time I thought it was hard because I had to tell him the bad news. In hindsight, I think I thought this was going to be the start of the end of his life. The point from which he continuously declined, wheelchair bound. What about the other foot? He won’t bounce back from this. In about 30 seconds in the hallway I had years of conversations with myself, worst case scenario planning, mourning, coping. It wasn’t the end. He rallied, he was stubborn, he put in the work, he walked again.
This year, July 10 was extra bananas (work stuff, more on that in the future). But after July 10 comes July 11. In the morning on July 11 I went to exercise and when I got to the field at the local park, it looked like a dragonfly farm. With a last name of Dragon, it’s natural to hold an extra affinity for dragonflies and my dad had various lawn and desk knickknacks, pictures, etc. And here were thousands? Tens of thousands? More than I could count, even if they cooperated by staying still for more than a few seconds. They ebbed and flowed around me. I was clearly in their space, not they in mine. I don’t believe in stuff, I have no faith, at least not in any religious sense. I don’t think the dragonflies are my dad, I don’t think he sent them there. But I definitely associate them with him, or him with them, since they’ve been around for millions of years, and he hasn’t yet. But none of that is to say I’m not overly obsessed with dragonflies. And the fact that the period dragonflies show up here overlaps basically with May-July? Sometimes we’re forgetful or too in the present. It’s nice to have reminders of where we’ve come from.
Newsletter image by Hannes Wolf on Unsplash