The Things He Left Behind
On my dad, 7 years after losing him.
The human body is said to replace itself every seven years. The idea is that seven years is how long it takes for every cell in the body to regenerate, which would mean that I am—quite literally—a completely different person today than I was on July 26, 2016, the day my dad died.
As with many things on the Internet, this isn’t true—and thank God for that. I hate the idea that there is no real part of me that was there for my last moments with my dad, or any of the years before that I got to spend with him. But it’s gotten me thinking about how many things have changed since 2016, and how different my life has been without him in it.
Losing my dad at 25 meant that he never really got to see me as the fully formed adult he worked so, so hard to shape. It means that he’ll never get to see the fruits of his labor from nagging me about my homework every night (which led to many sobbing, screaming fights) or driving me two and a half hours to and from SAT tutoring every Saturday morning (which also led to many sobbing, screaming fights because I would have much rather been watching my boyfriend play football). He died six weeks after I walked across the stage at my journalism school graduation—which meant, at the very least, he got to witness his lifelong dream of having a child with an Ivy League degree—but will never get to watch me fulfill his other dream of me becoming a professional writer.
It means that he’ll never get to meet the man I’m going to marry. Our last conversation—which, given the positive reports he’d received that day from his doctor, neither of us knew would be our last conversation—was about how sad he was that he was going to miss my wedding. As I begin to build a future with the person I plan to spend the rest of my life with, nothing breaks my heart more than knowing that my dad isn’t here to see it… especially because I know how much he would have loved him. (I can only imagine the two of them sneaking off for hours-long car rides to listen to Bruce Springsteen and talk about sports history while eating McDonald’s before sitting down for a Tarantino double feature).
It means that he won’t get to sit on the perfect (and famous) pink couch in the beautiful apartment that he helped me buy, or know that after he died, I traveled the world so that I could make the most of the life he left behind, or see that I wake up every morning trying to fulfill his mantra of doing something nice for someone every day. It means that he’ll never know that I became a person that I like to think he’d be proud of.
But just because he isn’t here to see it, it doesn’t mean he isn’t here for all of it. I look around at the beautiful life I’ve built these last seven years, and know that every single piece of it was only possible because of him. My career is what it is because he pushed the importance of education on me (and, at times, shoved it down my throat), and never stopped believing in the fact that my writing was good enough to be something real. My friendships are strong and meaningful because he taught me the importance of showing up, no matter what. My sense of humor, my love of pickles and the beach and Motown music, my inability to stay awake for an entire movie—all because of him. Hell, I even picked a partner who has all of his best qualities.
More than anything, though, it’s because of my dad that our family is the most important thing in my life. He taught all of us that no matter how hard things get, we’ve got each other, and being without him (which, let’s be honest, is the hardest thing any of us have ever been through) has somehow brought the rest of us even closer. We spent the past five days together, as we have almost every summer since we lost our fearless leader, and his legacy was all around us. It was there in our matching smiles and thicker-than-average eyebrows, our endless shit stirring at each other’s expense, and the immediate Dels Lemonade cravings we all got the minute we set foot on Rhode Island soil sand. It was there when we battled it out in the batting cages, and when none of us could figure out how to properly put the umbrella up at the beach. It was there when three generations stood at his grave, remembering for the zillionth time how much he missed him, and in all the love we felt being together.
In the last seven years, life has gone on without my dad. There have been new spouses, new babies, new houses, new jobs, new dogs, and a whole lot of ups and downs that would have been infinitely easier to navigate with him around. Things are different, and we’re all different because of the gaping hole he left in our lives. But he worked with every fiber of his being to leave all of us with the privilege of being the best versions of ourselves, and that’s exactly what he did. There is a piece of him in all of us: In one way or another, we’ve all got a little bit of his magic.
I miss my dad every day—especially today—but I know a piece of him is with me. Always.