The Reality of Dad

I love my dad. I loved my dad? Is there a language that extends the ability to conjugate tense to the noun rather than the verb? As in, Dad, but past tense. As in, Dad died, but the love did not. I loved my dad while he lived and continue to love him, or the idea of him at least, the memory, while he is dead, or roams an unearthly post-life space, or knocks into my window in the body of a cardinal, as my mom has postulated.

But that is not the point exactly. Time, and how people exist and then don’t. Or it is. The older I get, the more that line from John Muir, whom I can picture whispering to me from the nook of a giant Sequoia, fills my head like a fog: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Like an isle lost back to the ocean. What takes its place? The water that lapped at its banks and retreated, servile, compelled by its own nature, will reach out to touch whatever is there, the sinking tree line, its soft volcanic mouth, and when the oceanic plates miles below stop shifting, a gasp and then, as ever, the water reaches out again, out and over the disappeared land, and finds itself. Eventually, always, the tides will parley according to an ancient system and resume their even movement. As before, muscularly as before, but the landscape has changed and so its shape will, too.

My love for my dad was complicated—until he died. When he died, I could want for no more from him—he was dead. The onus to resolve anything between us, questions, resentments, holes he bored in me consciously or not, was on me. Even if I sought to bear it forever, there was no audience anymore, no one to certify, yes, you’re doing it right, to confirm, daughter, as nature intended. Nature is different now. The wind blows differently through a grove of trees than it does a paved forest. What shape are we now, without Dad?

Try to transfer this onus onto a Dad-shaped proxy, to outsource the ancestral call and response. Just try. Try for decades, make yourself pathologically, mysteriously miserable. We’ll all try, it’s our birth-given right. Blame your taste, blame them, blame them. Wait for them to answer, wait for them to answer, wait for them to answer.

I was lucky, in the way many of you have already read, I am lucky we got to separate together. I got to see my dad off. He acknowledged it, the sublimity, how his descension opened up a portal to a cosmic everything, the primordial, the basest root. The only reality, is and then isn’t.

I suppose I could have gone on seeking him forever, that in leaving I might’ve only sought him harder. I suppose I did, briefly. But when reality set in, when is and isn’t became clear, the birds ceased visiting, I felt my love for Dad go. Not gone though. Somewhere else, everywhere almost, as light and suffuse as the molecules of air that hold the world together. No shape. No need for shape. No need for shape anymore.

There was a ringing in my ears when you left. They say that every ring is a pitch you’ll never hear again, and I heard them all at once. I couldn’t hear anything else. It lasted ten seconds, maybe more, or less, like the sound of a prism, of time being swallowed, and when it disappeared, I heard nothing. It was like a vacuum of space, a hole opening in the ocean. I hear it still sometimes, the opening, and it’s unclear if you’re coming or going. If you ever left.