father dearest

it’s been 1 month since my dad died. </3

my dad in the 80s in california next to a tree. i found this picture in his desk. my mom took this photo of him.

here’s a reel that I made of me making this post into the monthly substack zine. (paid subscribers get one in the mail)

I have a lot of weird energy inside of me right now. I think ever since I got home, I haven’t been able to sit still. It makes me wonder if when my Dad died, his erratic energy shot its way across the country and put itself in me. I saw the death certificate, I saw the email that my stepmom sent tto whoever issues those things. The exact time of death was unclear, but it was around 1:59am, central time. That’s when the ambulance was called, though it didn’t make it there until thirty minutes later. At that moment, I was in Los Angeles, 11:59pm. I was still in yesterday, a day he had fully been alive for. I was back in time. It didn’t matter that the ambulance was late, though, it had happened quick. It had happened when he was in bed, in a state of rest. Nobody really goes to bed thinking they’ll wake up dead the next day, except for those Jesus freaks who won’t stop obsessing over saying We’re not promised another day! Which, yes, its true, we are not, but at whose whim? God? I don’t know. Do a lot of people lose faith in God after a tragedy, wondering why he could do such a thing so terrible, to tear away someone you loved from life, to hurt someone, to cause pain and suffering? Or do they keep believing? Why would he do any of that? I didn’t have to wait for someone I loved to die before I decided that I don’t believe in God, as pictured in Christianity. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder about what else is out there, and lately I’m beginning to notice that maybe everything is just random. Random as in, everything that seems like it's connected is only coincidence. And when it's not cohesive, then it’s just bad luck. Did a tree falling on my Father Dearest mean something? Was it supposed to happen right here and now to teach us a lesson about something we didn’t need teaching about until now? Or did he just happen to park the camper next to the one tree that was gonna fall that day? If a tree falls on your dad and kills him, did you even have a dad at all? It feels weird to be here. It feels strange, like I’m floating in and out of reality, but not in a scary way. I remember thinking how fucked that sounded when people would talk about grieving. It always sounded so fucking scary. The groups, the sadness. But it’s really nothing like I imagined it would be. It’s just… there, now. It's maybe the most predictable thing about life. Dying.

I found a run-on sentence essay I wrote about the idea of my dad dying, back last September a few days after his sixtieth birthday. I think I had it on my mind because when he came and stayed with us last summer, he told me about how he wanted a bumper sticker instead of a gravestone when he died. It came out of nowhere. It was a random topic we had never breached. I don’t know, maybe he had health problems that were more dire than I realized, or maybe it was just that time of his life where he should start thinking about our lives without him. As far as I knew, he was doing fine. Chess keeps saying He would have hated being old, and I think that’s true. When he died, I was alone in my hotel room in DTLA, probably flipping through the channels on TV and settling on some dumb house renovation show. Ancient Aliens wasn’t airing marathon-style like it was the night before and I was sorely disappointed. I spent the first week doing nothing. I went home to Arkansas, I had coffee and breakfast every morning with my family, Chess and I went to thrift stores and I took a couple of pole classes to pass the time. We drove around Fayetteville and I would point out all the places my Dad used to drive us when we were growing up there. We went to the Dickson Street Bookstore he took us to as kids and they still had his index card with marked out store credit throughout the past thirty years in the file at the front desk. We drove on all the back streets he would drive us kids on when he took us to his office on the weekends, so we could raid the merch closet and bring home lightning bug stuffed animals and koozies with the electric company he worked for’s logo on it. The second week, I laid on the beach with Chess in Miami. I sat in the sun for three days straight and came out the other side with a burnt nose, intense tan lines and the most smoothed-out pancake brain you could ever imagine. I kissed someone else in the ocean who wasn’t Chess and he kissed someone else who wasn’t me in the bathroom line at a nice restaurant. We ate crab legs one night because it was one of my Dad’s favorite things to do, so we indulged at the trashiest crab shack on the strip. I taught Chess how to get the meat out perfectly like my Dad taught me over the years. The third week, my brain turned back on from its vacation, the one that started when I left to go to LA for four days. Back when I still had a Dad that was alive. Its one thing to lose a pet to death, which is all I’d ever really experienced up until this point in my life, but a person? Particularly one who you’ve known since your first breath? Maybe since before that, hearing his cackle through my mom’s stomach? He was my biggest fan. He would buy me art sets for Christmas and let me make a mess in the laundry room tie-dying in the deep sink and painting on clothing on the countertop he tiled himself. He took me to New York for an in-person portfolio review when I applied to college, instead of just mailing it in. I said I wanna do art for my job and he said Okay, chick. He never once told me something wasn’t my best, or that I could do better. He was enamored by anything I created and it made me believe I could do this. He hung my art up around the house, he would buy me a new sketchbook from Barnes & Noble when I would run out of pages in my old one, he would come home with a new pack of Sharpies or colored pencils every once in a while for me from the supply closet of whatever vendor job he was working at the time. I don’t know why he loved this one so much, but one time in college I drew an illustration of animals dressed in proper clothes, like aprons and top hats and dresses and bonnets having a tea party around a huge wooden table together. He took a photograph of it on his fancy digital camera when I first showed it to him when he was visiting my apartment in Brooklyn once. The next time I came home, he had the photograph custom-printed onto a t-shirt for me. When Chess and I moved upstate, I gave him the original artwork and he had it framed. When we were there a few weeks ago, I noticed it was framed and hung in the living room above the chaise. When did he get a chaise? I feel restless. I feel like if I were to sit here for the rest of the night, typing away, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I feel like I need to get up and walk around or walk around the block, or take a lap around the block. Or maybe like I should go for a drive for a whole hour in the dark, winding forest roads, maybe stop at Stewart’s to get a scratch off card and a chocolate ice cream cone. I wonder what Chess would say if I asked him to come with me. I know my Dad would be up for it. He’d say, Where are the keys at, let’s go. He was so good at listening to his urges. He was always doing a million things all of the time. He was never questioning me any time I moved apartments, any time I changed my mind about something, any time I decided to change anything. He would always say, Cool, chick, or Do you need help moving? Or That sounds like fun. He was always doing something fun. He was always helping me move to the next part of my life. I miss him. I have photos of him spread out on our dining room table that I brought home from the last party we threw for him. Since he didn’t want a funeral, we threw a party in the backyard. The bar was open, my stepmom rented tents, the dogs were running around. Hardly anyone showed up in black, thank God. Everyone picked out their favorite photos of him and my sister-in-law got them printed out on poster board at Walgreens or something. I took one home of him holding a snake somewhere in Taiwan, or maybe the Philippines, when he was young and in the Navy. I took another one that was the last photo we had taken together on my phone at my brother’s wedding in Chicago this past October. It is at a completely unflattering angle of both of us and he’s making the dumbest face he could come up with. Of course that’s the last photo of us together. Of course a tree fell on him while he was doing the thing he loved most, existing in nature and camping with friends he loved. Of course he had the decency not to die on my actual birthday, just a week before instead, unlike Grandpa who had died on his. It feels so weird that I can’t just pick up the phone and send him a picture of the cats sleeping or me and Chess in front of an REI or Sierra Trading Post, or a highway sign that says Tannersville, or a picture of the Chinese place we’re going to eat at the next time he visits. It's weird because even though he isn’t here anymore, even though he is in the form of ashes in a USPS box in the upstairs closet of his office right now, I can still feel his energy everywhere. I feel it in me, I feel it in the people who knew him, I felt it in the house when we were home in Arkansas, I felt it when we were on the beach in Miami remembering all the times we would sit on the beach in Florida with him, his cooler between our chairs filled with roast beef and pepper jack sandwiches on rolls from the Walmart deli counter and Mike’s Hard Lemonades. The body that kept him alive all these years is gone, has failed him by no fault of his own, but he is very much still here. I was telling Chess the other day that I wonder what its going to feel like when we get to the first year anniversary of his death. I tell him I also wonder about what its going to feel like when I am sixty, the age he died. Or maybe thirty-two years from now, marking exactly half and half– half of my life with him and half of my life without him. It’s all very weird. This life we have to live is just really fucking weird.