On the Twentieth Anniversary of My Father’s Death

I’ve thought for weeks about how I would approach this day, what I would write. In the end, I didn’t even know where to start. The simple truth is, my dad has been dead exactly twenty years today. My thoughts are mostly questions, probably poorly organized, and largely unanswerable. Yet, here they are.

Twenty years! How? How is it possible that he never met either of my children, one of whom is soon to graduate high school? How did he miss all the ballet performances and basketball games, the babysitting, and the sleepovers? 

What about the house projects that I needed him for? The advice on how to stop mortally wounding myself every time I step into the garage? His well-timed, rapier-sharp, thoroughly-thought-out, one-line punches that could make me laugh out loud or immediately feel small because he just saw me do something dumb, and he wanted to correct me succinctly, but with warmth?

Why were we all robbed of twenty years of that? I should only now be worrying about how to prepare for his death, not writing about it as something from the distant past.

How is there still no treatment for ALS or other neuromuscular diseases? How do we still have diseases that we can describe down to their stages of progress, ending in death, but not have a clue how to treat them?

I think about darker things, too, of course. He died at 58. I’m 51. Does that mean anything? If not literally, then philosophically? We all know, in a vague, uncomfortable sense, that our time is limited here. But once Dad knew how limited his time was, what were his thoughts and regrets? What did he look back at in his life and think, “Why the hell did I waste even one second of time worrying about THAT?” Or, “Why didn’t I give THAT a shot? What did I really have to lose?” 

Those of us who have watched a loved one (or multiple loved ones) die of a terminal illness know that it’s nearly impossible to ask those questions and have those discussions while the dying person is in front of us. It’s tantamount to admitting that their battle is lost, that you just want as much information as possible from them for posterity, because you’ve already given up on them.

I’ve had two decades since his death to realign my own life in a way that would make me ready to offer those answers to my own children without putting them in the position of being afraid to ask when my time comes. And yet, like most humans, I am also hardwired to think there’s no reason I won’t live to a hundred. 

What purpose does that serve the human brain, I wonder.

So, another year — an important anniversary — now past, I’ll take my ramblings back in to my head, away from the annals of a virtually unknown blog.  

Because honestly, I can’t answer most of these questions with any more certainty than I could at 4:47 am on September 1, 1999.

I miss him.