Gone but Never Forgotten…
Yesterday made one year that my father has been gone from this human realm. As many reasons as I had to smile all day, I felt the corners of my mouth turn down when I wasn’t performing for others. When the Google Meetings, chats with friends, and hilarious memes came thru my various DMs, I felt a heart string or two pull a little bit because of the smiles and laughs but no room for cries. I’m working on not telling myself how I’m supposed to feel when I think of my father because it’s a constant battle with other people’s voices attempting to get me to only see the best parts of him. I suppose that’s easy to do when the good a parent does outweighs the bad but it’s damn near impossible when most memories are accompanied by nightmares… or a drifting of thoughts you’d rather not have…
It isn’t even that I’m forcing myself to think less of him… it’s that I’ve heard amazing stories about my father from people who only knew the man he was the minute he would leave his home… or when he knew there were eyes present that he wanted to leave impressed. I’ve find myself wishing that I had more good things to say about him to keep the conversation going. When the anniversary of his death got closer, it reminded me that he apologized to my mother, sister, brother and nephew for being less than he knew he could be but I struggle with knowing I wasn’t important enough (to him) to receive the same apology.
It makes me think about all of the people that I supposedly meant something to but behaved in a similar fashion. It reminded me of someone telling me that maybe people don’t apologize to me because I don’t make it easy for them to say they’re sorry… and I have to laugh as I remember that too because since when did sincere apologies become something that was automatically easy? If someone matters to us enough to say “I love you”, why wouldn’t we do it despite the ease of it all… unless we really aren’t sorry for how we treated them? But that was something else my father didn’t really tell me all that much… I love you.
It’s an odd thing how we can love people who really don’t love us because of our human need to be in community with others. I like to tell myself that it’s my DNA that makes me still be attached to someone who seemed to do their best to stay detached… however I know there’s more to it than genetics. So yes, I do take it hard when those closest to me or claim to be close, aint all that kind or loving to me… or my child. It isn’t just me being upset because people aren’t doing what I want them to do… I want to know I matter to these people who claim I’m so important to them. What human being doesn’t want this? Yet, when you say it exactly like that, “I want to know I matter”, people will lose the entire context and turn it into this ugly thing of a person being starved for attention… and needy.
It isn’t that attention from anyone will do because that isn’t what I want. I want their actions to not tell the story that they say “I love you” simply so they can get what they need when I say it back. I want the people who claim my daughter is so important to them to consistently act like it because she deserves more than the smoke blown up her ass simply because someone had the time today. I want it to be okay to feel all of this while holding on to the times my dad did make me laugh and smile. I want the 42 years of being his daughter to be acknowledged in entirety among the people who say I matter to them, without them trying to convince me that he did his best… because he didn’t… and if he was anyone else's father, they’d admit that…
Yesterday made me realize how much I wanted from my father that I will never get… it didn’t involve money, possessions, or praise but it did involve something that I know he didn’t have enough of… love.
His death also reminded me that just like he had a choice in being better to his children, I too have a choice to be my best to my own child. So his death wasn’t for naught in my mind… if I got nothing else from him taking the eternal dirt nap, I get an annual reminder to love others as much as I claim I do and not to settle for being loved less than the love I give. Even though nothing replaces the hole left by a parent who didn’t give you what you needed, love that’s felt and seen from others comes in real close. I hope whatever happens after life, if the old man has a chance to be better, he’s doing exactly that because what we fuck up in one life, maybe we can get it right in another.
