To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Thomas Campbell
Today is the anniversary of Ken’s death, and tomorrow would have been the 31st anniversary of our wedding day – magic and loss forever side by side on my calendar. My daughter sent me a text last night, telling me she has a visceral memory of the two of us telling ourselves that one day it will be decade since it happened – and we will hardly believe it. I remember that conversation too, my then teenage girl telling me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store to keep her warm. We were right – we can hardly believe it.
He was her father for just 5, 810 days – just not enough. He was her first word and it was towards him that she took her first tentative little steps. On one of his birthdays, she first clapped her hands. He taught her how to pay attention, pointing out things that otherwise might go unnoticed – a collectible coin in a handful of loose change, critters in a tide pool, a tiny hummingbird nest concealed within the branches of a Hong Kong orchid that grew outside her bedroom window, a constellation of stars in a winter sky, or pain in the eyes of a stranger holding a “Homeless” sign at the entrance to the freeway.
There’s so much she doesn’t know about him, that when she was a baby, he brushed her hair with a soft toothbrush, that he was a sentimental old fool who didn’t mind a chick flick. He loved “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” as much as he loved Goodfellas, and although it never made it on one of the playlists I made for our summer roadtrips, his favorite song was “All in the Game.” So many milestone moments fill scrapbooks and old VHS tapes she is unable to watch. She remembers his unconditional love, his constancy, his wisdom. She remembers how he was there to pick her up after school every day – always too early – because he never wanted her to come out of school and not find him waiting for her in the shade of what they had claimed their mesquite tree. She remembers how he took her to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard every Friday afternoon and how he would remind her to remind him to feed the family of hummingbirds that considered our patio their home.
Together, they shared thousands of little routines and rituals that helped create an unshakeable certainty for her first 15 years. And even though it won’t be long before he has been gone for almost as long, it is still surreal to write about him in the past tense.
Last year, she honored his memory with the following:
It’s always surreal to write a remembrance post. I never feel entirely at ease about it — publicizing grief, that is — but, letting the day slip away without honoring my father’s memory would be to disregard the loss of the most warm-hearted, intelligent, perceptive father I had the fortune of being raised by.
He passed in the weeks following Samhain and Día de los Muertos -celebrations of when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest. As we journey into December, wherein the veil supposedly restores its usual impermeable quality, I’ll continue to look for the slivers of his light that peek through the cracks. Like a hand poking through a dense theater curtain to sneak a cheeky wave to the audience, I find that signs and symbols reminding me of my father seem to slip surreptitiously — mischievously — into view during these months.
Sometimes it’s a classic rock song. Sometimes it’s a dream where we chitchat about nothing. Sometimes it’s javelinas mysteriously materializing on Father’s Day to eat my mother’s plants and nestle comfortably in the muck of the flowerbed. Little coincidences that don’t quite feel coincidental, and are always just enough to make me cry with boundless gratitude.
I love my dad.
I loved him too.
On his anniversary, I am reminded again of the notion that we die three times – the first when our breath leaves our body; a second time when our loved ones return our body to the ground; and, the third and final death, a moment, sometime in the future, when our name is spoken for the last time.
Today I say your name, Ken, with unending gratitude for all the ways your life enriched mine over the 23 years we spent together, for your wit and wisdom and the light that shines on in our daughter, for your sense of wonder and your rock ‘n’ roll heart.
