You Should Be Here

Mom says she thinks about you constantly, but she has to keep functioning. She can’t lose herself to grief. It would be easy to be consumed, but we have to keep going. I see you when I wake up early on a weekend for a run, when I see a dad teaching his daughter how to ride a bike, when I watch the Illini lose another game, when I make a simple can of soup for lunch like you always did, and when I hear Led Zeppelin. I see you everywhere, and yet you’re not here. You should be here.

I’ve heard that having something good makes it harder to lose. I knew I had the best dad in the world, but I just wasn’t prepared to lose you so soon. No one was ready. It’s not feasible for a healthy 58 year old person to die suddenly. Gratitude helps sometimes. Telling myself that I’m lucky to have had the best dad for 28 years of my life, or even to have had a dad who was present at all. But it’s not me who I mourn for. I mourn for Mom, but mostly I mourn for you. You should be here.

You did everything you were supposed to do. You got a job at 16 years old, you paid your way through college, you established a career, you bought a townhouse with your best friend, you got married and had kids, you bought a house, you excelled at your job, you made time for your family, you prioritized your health, you were happy. You were so happy. All the time. More than any other person I’ve known, you made the best of any situation. To you, life was too short and too sweet to spend time being unhappy.

I realized that you had a better than average outlook on life when you were here. I just didn’t have enough time with you, or maybe I didn’t have enough self/world awareness to ask you how to get to that place. How do you see beauty in life when you lose your job because your boss’s son graduated college and is taking your territory? How do you see beauty when you lose half your retirement savings in the stock market crash? How do you see beauty when your brother and nephew pass away within a short time frame, both from unfair reasons? You took a moment every day to appreciate something little. Whether it was the first bloom in Spring, a few wild turkeys on your morning bike ride, or local football team winning their first home game. The beauty is still here and you should be here to see it.

Each moment brought you back to a memory. You were nostalgic in the most fascinating way. You didn’t long for the past. Instead you let it resonate inside you. It shaped your interests and what you chose to focus on in your life. Riding banana bikes around the neighborhood as a kid formed your passion for biking, which you did every weekend. Joining the swim team in high school gave you a life long passion for swimming, which you shared with myself, Luke, and all your boot camp friends. I don’t fully remember my decision to become a lifeguard in high school, but I know I did because you told the best stories of your summers at Arlington Park pool. You and Mom never forced Luke and I into anything. We wanted to try things because of the way you talked about them. Maybe it was romanticizing a situation. Either way, you made the best of everything.

You should be here to enjoy everything you worked for your whole life. You and Mom had trips planned for when you retired. Luke and I will go on those trips with her, but it’s still not fair. You spent your life working and doing things for other people without taking enough time for yourself. I’m sure you would disagree with me on that point. You would say that you enjoyed every minute of it. How did you do that? How did you reach a point of content while still learning and growing and striving for more in life? It is so hard to strike a balance between being comfortable and being fulfilled. Does that balance happen with age? Why didn’t’ I ask you any of these questions? You should be here so we can talk about it.

No one is fully prepared for the death of a parent. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how close you are with your parent, your life will be altered. In your case, Papa, I will forever strive to appreciate the little things in life. When I’ve had a bad day, I’ll remember the pictures you sent from your business trips. Normally a business trip would be a burden, but you used them to go explore a part of the country that you had never seen. Even if it was a small town in Indiana, you managed to find something of interest. Maybe you never got to travel the world, but you did make the best of every place you did see. I could try harder to find something to make a bad day better. A cool breeze on a fall night. A bike ride at 9pm because there is still light in the sky. Flannel pants, slippers, and a movie marathon in the winter.

Everything I do now is with you in mind. I still want to share interests with you. I want to put on your Jethro Tull album and have you tell me about the time that Grandma and Grandpa got home early from vacation while you were having a party at the house. I want to hear that story over and over and over. And every other story. I want to call you on my way home from work when I know you would be in the car driving home too. I want to stay up “late” (like 11pm) watching TV and drinking beers with you on weekends that I visit home. Only to know that you’ll be biking or running at least an hour before me the next morning. You should be here.

I still want to make you proud, whether or not you’re up somewhere watching over me. Maybe that’s what every parent wants. To ingrain a little part of his or herself in her child. You accomplished it. You were the best role model. I was and now am so appreciative of you as a person and a parent. If I accomplish nothing else in life but to live life you did, I will live well. You should be here to see that.

It’s been two years without you now and sometimes it feels like an eternity. Other times it feels like the last two years went by in a blink. I blame the latter on days or weeks that passed when I was unable to really participate in life, too consumed by grief. There are less of those days now. And I’m sure you would be happy to know that we aren’t wasting our lives away. The grief now comes in moments. Moments that I want to share with you. Instead, I try to turn these moments into happy memories. That’s the legacy you left everyone- happy memories that we are now so fortunate to have. You should be here to create more memories with us.