#181 Fatherless

And other quiet words I’m still learning to live with

Dearest,

Yesterday marked one year of being fatherless.

Fatherless.

I’ve been sitting with that word. Turning it over, quietly, like a stone in my palm, one with very rugged edges.

I’ve been trying to write about my father from this new place, this place of fatherlessness. And it’s been as hard as one can imagine.

Because in blocking out the sadness, I think I blocked the happy memories too.

I can see us in the balcony, sharing a cigarette, but I can’t remember what we talked about.

I can see him stretched out on my bed as I typed at the desk, but I’ve forgotten the lines he quoted from the book he was reading.

I remember his face when he ate (God, his favorite thing to do), but not the way he beckoned me over for bites from his plate.

I do remember one thing clearly though. He’d say, “What will you do when I’m not there?”

What will you do when I’m not?

Was that his way of preparing me?

He lost his own father at 25. I lost mine at 30. Did those extra five years prepare me better?

Or just give me more to hurt with? More time to see him not just as my father, but as a man. And in seeing him as a man, in letting the pedestal go, did I lose him all over again?

I know time is the only thing that will make sense of these questions. But one year has passed, and I find myself exactly where I was the day he left.

I wanted him to go from my bedroom, his favorite place in the world. So that’s where we set up the ICU.

He spent seven days there. And then, at 9:26 AM, a man who was never up before ten, left.

I keep joking that maybe the pitch death made him for his next life was enticing enough for him to leave home that early.

And me? I’ve just been staring at the wall. When I am not working, I am staring at the wall. When I am not playing, I am staring at the wall. When I am not sleeping, I am staring at the wall.

Recently, I tried talking to a friend about him. And all that came out was anger. Anger at him. At me. At everything.

Anger at seeing parts of him in myself this past year. In the decisions I made. In the silences. The impulses. The regrets.

How do you mourn someone you're still in conversation with?

I wonder what my father at 25 made of this. He spoke often of his own father, and when he did, it was always with awe. With hero worship. Maybe because they only had ten conversations between them. Maybe because grief, at that age, needed a god, not a man.

But me? I had time. Time to see him whole. Time to watch him laugh and fail and rage and soften. Time to argue with him and forgive him and ask for his forgiveness. Time to love him as a person, not a symbol.

And maybe that’s why this hurts in all the wrong places.

I’m still learning what it means to be fatherless. Not just in name, but in the dailiness of absence.

In the way I reach for the phone and stop. In the empty chair pulled out of habit. In the unspoken advice I still wait to hear. In the way I notice his gestures now showing up in mine, like a muscle memory I have inherited.

Last month, I drove to Bhutan.

He wouldn’t have believed it. Wouldn’t have allowed it either. “Drive when I’m gone,” he used to say, half-joking, wholly terrified of me behind the wheel. And yet, he told my mother once that I drove well. Weirdo.

I went to see our old home. The one he lived in for thirty-five years. The one I was born in. The one I didn’t get to mourn when we left in 2022. There were bigger things to look after then.

I stood outside with my brother, just watching the veranda.

The door to it was closed. There were clothes hanging. Neatly, properly. Dad would have approved of that.

And both of us just stood there, waiting for the door to open and for the man to emerge, cigarette lit, face unreadable and beloved at once, staring into some distant thing only he could see.

His love never came with an agreement to let you into that world.

But maybe just standing outside it, being loved from its edge, was the gift.

He asked me often, “What will you do when I’m not there?”

I suppose I’ll have to answer it with my life. And I hope, wherever he is, that will be answer enough.

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