The Riptide

A Father's Day post

My father and us.

Today is Father’s Day. I lost my father December 31, 2022, a little over a year after I lost my mother in December 2021. For those of you who have just joined the conversation, and didn’t check my about page, this personal information will be new to you. This will be a piece about loss and what I’ve learned from the tidal wave of grief I experienced between 2021 and 2022.

I’m currently trying to write an essay for a publication that’s not on Substack. It’s about enduring love, and at its core is the unmoored feeling I’ve lived with since my parents’ deaths. Recently, I saw something on one of the other social media platforms that stated that many childless millennials will soon begin to lose their parents and become destabilized. I’ve carried my orphan card for the past four years. I’m not sure I can say that I feel a sense of destabilization. But there have been plenty of nights where I’ve woken up suddenly and felt that my life no longer has a secure sense of meaning to it. I’m not saying it’s meaningless. Rather, it’s held less firmly in place, despite it becoming more fixed.

When my mother died, my family began to fall apart. My mother must have known this might happen. When my parents divorced back in the mid-1990s, she’d done everything she could to be like a rubber band so that she could keep her family from separating apart. I was a child, so I didn’t recognize any of this. When my mother died, what held us together disintegrated.

Following one of the more trying exchanges I had with my brother during my mom’s final weeks, and there were countless of these to the point that I felt like I was living out a kitchen sink drama, I expressed anguish to my husband about this disintegration. We were running an errand together and he said to me, “look, your family fell apart years ago. It just took your mother’s death for it to become finalized.”

That was true. My husband has the ability to cut through all the emotional fat and boil things down to a fact.

I could have been more angry at my father for leaving my mother and our family. But I accepted things. I forgave him. When I returned from my high school exchange year in Germany, my dad moved out a week or two later. In retrospect, I assume he stayed only to make the transition for me a little easier. Everything back then felt like it was happening so quickly. It was the same exact feeling when my mom died. This feeling is akin to being caught in a riptide. There is an invisible motion that isn’t within our control. The best one can do is not struggle against it and to try quickly to find a way out from its grasp.

Still, I think back on the final year of my dad’s life. A year in which I only saw him once in person. This was at my mother’s funeral. He refused to greet me because his wife had started fighting me two weeks prior to my mom’s death. I was so exhausted and stressed out that I stupidly took the bait. I can’t blame myself for this though. I had been the primary caregiver for my mom for four months while she was bedbound from her cancer. I was also working full time in healthcare communications at the height of the pandemic. I was at my breaking point.

Apart from the funeral, we spoke only one time on the phone and it didn’t end well. Then, months later he was dead. His heart had given out suddenly. It wasn’t a massive heart attack where one grabs their chest and dramatically falls over. He just laid his head down on the desk and died. My sister told me she’d last seen him in the kitchen getting coffee that morning and then heading back to his office. He appeared to be doing well. He died sometime between then and when he was discovered later that morning.

That day I got a call from my sister that my father had died. Many of you were reading this Substack at the time. I’d just posted about the one-year anniversary of my mom’s death. Two weeks later I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breath from the grief that walloped me again. I was so angry that I’d not had a chance to reconcile things, that we’d never spoken again.

I still remember a few weeks before he died thinking that maybe he’d speak to me again if I had a major thing happen around my writing career. This was delusional, but I think also normal for any child whose parent has excommunicated them. The need to feel understood, to feel seen, to be admired, is a driving force behind why writers write. I do believe we would have eventually reconciled. All I wanted was for him to be proud of me.

I haven’t written much about my dad here. Not really. A few poems here, here, here, and here. I also wrote the announcement of his death when it happened and I also wrote this essay. But it never feels like its enough. I often feel neglectful about it. As if I’m letting him slip further and further away from me. Some of this is because of how painful that time was. How difficult it is to re-enter that pain.

The only thing I can do is continue to follow his advice to not give up on my writing. He’d told me he believed I could achieve my goals. This was before what happened, before the riptide dragged us apart.