Two nights ago I cried pretty unexpectedly at the end of the Bojack Horseman episode, Free Churro. Have you seen it? The entire thing was Bojack giving a eulogy for his recently deceased mother, with whom he had a very strained & complex relationship. It was sad and powerful and raw and brutal and articulated so many feelings I have toward my father (and slightly with my mother too in the past). Feelings of dismissal.
With every death anniversary or milestone hit; 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, half my life with him gone, more than half my life with him gone, 20 years, I think—or hope—to myself, that this is it. After this, I am done. I am moving on. I am no longer saving space in my life for this loss. But with every new year, it becomes clear to me that the loss is saving space for me, and it probably always will. Because it’s never just about the date that he died. It’s about the date that he chose to leave. And everything he chose to miss or leave behind. In my life and now his granddaughter’s as well.
Today marks 21 years.
21 years ago Christmas changed for me. Every feeling and emotion encapsulating it. It became a melancholy time of year I hoped would pass quickly. In fact, it was more than 15 years after he’d died that I got my first Christmas tree. But it still felt forced or insincere. Now that I have Mina, I finally have the greatest reason in the world to put these mournful associations to rest, to untangle his death from the holidays and this time of year. So we have a tree and lights in our bay window, we have gifts, we have lights up outside, Christmas music and movies playing in the background. I want this to be a magical time of year for my daughter, the way it used to be for me. And maybe through her, I can recapture some of that wonder I lost 21 years ago. Because of her, my heart is here in the present floating effortlessly into the future, instead of trudging through the past, lingering on past wrongs wrought or potentials that will never come to pass.
“My *father* is dead and everything is worse now.”
Miss you dad. And I still love you, even if life with you was incredibly hard.