Today I was out weeding a garden bed while my daughter rode her bike, supervised by her father. I have been trying for four years to get perennial flowers to take over this stretch of dirt along the fence of the alpacas’ spacious run. Last summer, Wild Bergamot finally bloomed and the sunflowers do well enough there, but each year has been a labor of love, weeding, watering, and seeding over and over. Bindweed was consuming the space, and I knew I needed to pull it before it choked out any other seedlings, but I felt that if I let it grow awhile, it would keep the soil moist enough for seeds to germinate.
I wrote a book about my dad in the immediate aftermath of losing him. His death was like a stray lightning bolt that set me running. I was only 31. There was so much to remember; so much I was afraid I would forget.
The book is terrible, with plenty of evidence of the brain fog grief created. But in it, there were pearls, which I transferred to three essays about my dad, the vastness of his talent, the conflicts of his personality, and the weight of losing him.
One essay was accepted to a lit mag last summer and I am still patiently awaiting its release in September, just after the sixth anniversary of Dad’s death. The other two, I have been submitting, revising, and submitting for 18 months in one case, and nine in the other. I believe in them. The thing is, so many of us carry grief. My essays, although I think they are good, exist in a whole wide network of competing writing about grief and about losing a parent. It's all a lonely process.
My creative pursuits are bound tightly to memories of my dad. No one has ever pushed me harder. And maybe because I have so often felt overlooked or outpaced, I understood that the pushiness was love. It was annoying but valuable. I did not take it for granted. My dad told me I wasn't allowed to get married until I finished my Ph.D. That was absurd. I did get married about 10 months before I graduated, just for the record. Maybe because I read so many girlhood narratives and Victorian novels in my graduate work, I understood, after my eye-rolling, that it meant something serious that my father wanted me to prioritize my education. He believed in me in ways that perhaps reached beyond my actual talents into a world of dreams and aspirations.
When I was 15, I got a column writing movie reviews for a local newspaper, The Waynedale News, which I write to this day. Dad decided I should try to syndicate it, so he paid the postage for me to mail cover letters and clippings to small newspapers over a tristate area. Friends, I did not have a driver's license yet, and he thought I might write a syndicated column. I understand now that this project was also lovingly absurd. I did get a couple of really nice "keep at it, kid" notes back from editors, which I still have somewhere. I also have the "poor man's copyright" of my first novel, which he paid the postage for me to mail to myself. As if someone would ever want to print the stupid thing. I will never open it, because that would defeat the purpose and because I never want to read it. If I die young, Julio, you are to burn those envelopes, I swear to God.
In the trauma of Dad's sudden death, I got it stuck in my head that at 61, my number would also be up. I know. I know. This is not my rational brain talking to me (or is it?). But dammit, if I didn't take off sprinting. We got the alpacas. Life was too short to wait. I wrote the aforementioned bad book. And I find, these years later, I spend my days oscillating between this spriting—there's so little time—and standing still to take in the minutia of moments. I don't want to look at memes and reels. I want to look at the curve of my child's nostrils and the trees that reach far, far above my neighbors' roof.
For me, grief has been like that bindweed. It created a dark, tear-soaked cover under which things germinated. And eventually, that cover had to go for those same things to grow in the sun. If you garden, you know that weeding is hard, necessary work. Sometimes, Dad made us weed and it felt like a punishment. Now, though, I find it cathartic. And I am old enough to know that if I feel something, other people feel that thing too.
Grieving and writing can be very lonely. I sometimes feel despairingly lonely in my work—achingly invisible, like that young girl with dreams all over again. Talking to other people about grief has often reminded me of how particular it is. I couldn't stop sweating after Dad died; other people might not be so smelly. As much as we cannot feel another person's bodily pain, and are thus prone to think they are exaggerating, we cannot understand the specifics of another person's grief. It is so mysteriously connected to dreams, memories, expectations, and the ephemera of our emotional lives. I think that difficulty explains why so many people write about grief, trying to make sense of it and to connect over it.
Father's Day doesn't bother me anymore. My wounds have mostly scabbed. I do not want to bring anyone down with this note. That's not my point. My point is that so many of us carry grief. And so many of us are trying to build something. And both of those experiences are profoundly lonely. Cheer each other on. Celebrate the swings and the misses. Check in on each other. Dream absurd dreams, because just the act of dreaming can feel like love.