Two years ago today, you died, Dad.
You missed the Alaska cruise, the week in London, two weddings, one at the exquisitely chic Sonoma winery, where you would have made that face you made whenever you succumbed to pressure to taste a great red wine, which never delivered anything close to the two-packet Sweet-n-Low iced tea you liked, the other one beautiful as the San Marcos hillside, your grandson handsome as a GQ model, his bride stunning and kind, laughing and happy, the two of them emanating enough joy that you would have forgotten the crazy mishigas your former daughter-in-law created.
You missed your funeral, and you might not have been surprised that I attended it alone – a husband’s unwillingness to carry one sixth of his father-in-law’s coffin, to comfort a grieving daughter, to guide a teenage grandson through grief – his failure to mourn you, Dad, was what gave me strength to leave, and you missed his leaving, and my rebuilding, and the edited versions of dating stories I would have shared with you, and the loves that came next, some brief, some not-so-brief, some not-quite loves, some near-misses, and the surprise that came like a cherry on top, that I can’t yet tell you how it will turn out, but you missed meeting him when Mom was here for Thanksgiving, the one after the car accident where we could have lost Justin, where nothing ended up in the same place after the snow globe of life shook and tumbled and rolled, three times, crash landed near an overpass and of course, it was Mom who dropped everything to come out and help us.
On this day last year, you missed your first Yarzheit, the bittersweet evening I heard your name read aloud, stood proudly to recite the mourner’s prayer, memorized now, even Justin had it memorized. Two generations stood that Friday night, Dad, your still-living DNA carriers, mouthing ancient Aramaic words and nodding to each other, remembering the best of you, proud to be recognized by name as your daughter, a complete 180 from the years-we-don’t-mention, when not even you wanted to be known by your name and you grew that beard of shocking white so the face in the mirror wasn’t yours. Was this the power of the ritual for you, too, Dad, when you recited Kaddish for your parents, twice daily for an entire year for each of them? Did it release you, too, from the weight of their worldly failings? Open up a way to love them again?
You missed a really ugly election year, Dad, and some wonky Wisconsin weather – it was warmer in Milwaukee last week than it was in Seattle. Just this past Sunday you missed the news – a rain storm toppled that giant ancient sequoia we drove through on the family trip, when I was young enough to sit in the back seat and scream through every death-defying curve of Highway 1. How it is my screaming didn’t cause you to drive off the road is something I considered only after parenthood pried open my tightly grasped fists of timeworn indignities and wrongs.
Oh, Dad, you’ve missed so much. I wrote a taut little poem about watching your newly-divorced Rabbi’s ass sway as he chanted the minyon service, it’s build season again for Robotics, Mom took another cruise, this time to the Panama Canal, and I have a sense we’re gonna get a call any day that babies are on the way from the two wedded couples. They will be loved and welcomed babies, brought up in a family with as much craziness as the next, but maybe one of them will make your scrunched up face when they taste something someone else tells them is delicious. You wanted two-packets-worth of sweetness, and it turns out I do too – yours mixed into iced tea, mine into a poem, dissolving on my tongue as I recite Kaddish again for you today.