I Miss My Dad
I came across your site by typing in “I miss my father” because it’s been 3 weeks and I feel worse now than I did a few weeks ago. The numbness is gone I guess. The first letter I e-mailed to my dad’s address, scared as hell that mailer-daemon would tell me it didn’t go through. I wrote that one a week-and-a-half after he died. I wrote the second two weeks after his death. He was 52. I’m 18. I had been in college for 3 weeks. Dear Dad, I miss you so much. I love you and I know you knew that. It’s just hard to believe that you’re gone. Every night I go to sleep thinking that I’ll wake up in the morning and none of this will have happened. I would give anything to see you again, even for just one for time. We didn’t get to see much of each other in the last few months and I had so many plans for the coming weekends when I would come home with no obligations other than to spend a day at the fall festival with you. I was even planning to finally go with you to a computer meeting on the weekend that Mom would be in Denver. I was going to come home just for you. I feel like I need to bargain with someone, but logically I know that it’s no use. Not a day has gone by since your death that I haven’t cried. I’m trying to get on with life and go back to school. I want to make you proud, but it’s so hard. Each little upset sends me into a frenzy. I want to kick and scream. I want to be angry with someone, but the only one I come to is you – for not taking better care of yourself – for smoking even though I asked you not to. I know you were trying those last few weeks. I know you were happier and you and mom were making plans together for the rest of your lives. I feel like you got cheated. You were not a famous man, I know, but you could have been, and I feel sorry that you had too many fears to achieve the greatness that you deserved. Thank you for your sense of humor – I vow to carry on the torch and make people laugh in obscure ways. Thank you for your intelligence. I’m sorry I didn’t listen more carefully to your mini-lessons when I was younger. I learned so much from you. You knew something about everything. Thank you for teaching me about computers. More, thank you for teaching me about animals and nature. Thank you for my love of the ocean and water. More and more, I see that the things I always valued in myself can be attributed directly to you. I was so proud of you as my father. You talked about me with your co-workers, but I talked about you with my friends. I want everyone to know how great you were. I want to tell them all our stories. I want to carry on our inside jokes. I miss being little enough to be carried on your shoulders and to sit in your lap. I miss being tickled and tucked into bed. I miss watching The Red Green Show with you and Red Dwarf and I’m sorry I always changed the channel when Dr. Who came on. Thank you for always letting me. Thank you for random Chinese dinners and for always giving me more money than I asked for when I asked. Thank you for listening to me when I had a problem and for never trying to fix things, but just being there. Thank your rare and unforgettable hugs. I’m sorry you had to go through some hard times, but thank you for sticking around when you did. I wish I could have done more for you then. I’m going to miss you at my wedding, but I will tell your grandchildren all about how smart, funny, and wonderful you were. I will think of you when I graduate and when I get my first real job. You were always there during my big moments, and you were there for a lot of the small ones there too. My soccer games. Basketball games. T-ball. Softball. You even came and watched me practice. You came and watched me learn to ride a horse. You taught me to feed them with a flat hand. You helped me raise frogs from tadpoles. You always encouraged me in whatever I did. You were just always there. How can it be that you just aren’t now? I love you. I always will. I know you know that, but I wanted to tell you again. If nothing else, I wanted to tell you one for time. So much love from your daughter, Katherine Dear Dad, I still miss you so much. I’ve come up with several semi-plausible stories in which I get to talk to you again. I always end up crying because I know that it could never happen. Could it? I found that picture of you and me at the father-daughter dance when I was 7 or 8. I’m wearing that 80’s poufy dress that Granny gave me and I’m sitting on your lap and you’re in your good suit – you look so spiff! And nice. The smile on your face there is so genuine – it’s one of the few pictures I have of you smiling for real because you hated getting your picture taken. I do too, but from now on, I’m going to welcome it because I don’t want anyone I might leave behind to have to rely of his or her memory alone to remember my beautiful face. I remember those dances. It was always just you and me. I remember standing on your shoes while you pretended to know how to “waltz” and “ballroom dance,” when really it was always the same off-beat clunking around in circles. I didn’t notice. I didn’t care. I remember once all the dads went on stage to sing “My Girl” to the their daughters, and I couldn’t find your face up there, so I looked for you, and I found you outside – smoking. That’s what kills me most of all – that you continued to do something so horrible for you, missed moments because of it, wasted money. I got so mad at you for smoking, and I told you, but when you didn’t stop, so I started ignoring it and accepting it, and I kind of feel it’s partly my fault you didn’t quit in time. I will never smoke, nor will I tolerate smoking from anyone else. I used to want to redo parts of life to make my current life better. I used to wish I could go back, knowing what I know now. But now I want to go back just to be with you again. I want to watch Buffy with you and hang around the house. I want to ask you to go on school field trips like the one for marine biology freshman year, and I want you to come see me march in the show, or spin a flag, or whatever. I just want you to be there. I want to cheer you on in pumpkin walks and visit computer shows. I want to go back to the days of the FPYC Father’s Day Tournament when I always knew you were silently cheering me on. I want to hear you joke about everything. I want you to yell, “Flaming death!” as we take a corner too hard and I want you to snicker maliciously behind your hand. I never perfected your spidering techniques, and now I never will. Do you remember thumb-thing and thumb-thing else? I’ve already forgotten most of the jokes from when I was little. “One false move, and you know what I’ll do?” “Something mean!!” And then you’d tickle me and my sides would ache. No one quite understands the humor in tearing someone’s arm off and beating him with the bloody stump like we did. No one knows the songs we sang with the bad lyrics. I’ve already forgotten so much and you’re not here anymore to remind me! How can I hold on to these memories without you here to fill in the holes? I’m dreading the holidays. I can’t do Christmas without you. I want to go with you to the Easter sunrise service. And Father’s Day – what do I do then? I realized today that before I’d never gone for more than two weeks before without talking to you by e-mail or phone at least, and that was only when I was at summer camp. I miss you and I can’t see that ever going away. Love by millions, Katherine Thank you for your site. Maybe someday soon I’ll have the strength to go and get help.
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