I look awful in this photo, so I don’t share it a lot. I have it framed, but I don’t often show people. I really should start. It was maybe two degrees out that day and bitingly windy. I had just come off the ice from playing hockey and my eye makeup was running, but I was so happy. This is what my real smile looks like, and it’s not very pretty but it’s honest. I was 18, and Daddy had just turned 56. He would be dead about six months later.
There aren’t as many pictures of Daddy and I together as I would like, mostly because he was usually the one behind the camera. I have lots of pictures of me, and lots of pictures of him that I took, and a good number of full family shots, but just a small collection of images of the two of us over the years.
Every day when I look in the mirror I’m reminded that I inherited his face, and hair, and skin, and weird knobby knees. I took on his propensity for computer programming, forests, kayaking, reading, socialism, damaged people, and introversion as well. But I desperately wish that I could have somehow picked up just an ounce of his seemingly boundless optimism in the short amount of time I got to share with him, and I feel like I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to be even a quarter as good as he was.
Every day I wish I could see his smile one more time, every day I wish I could show him my computer projects, or ask him what airplane is flying over head, or go walk in the woods with him. Every day I wish I could sing for him. Every day I wish I could tell him I love him, or tell him what I learned, or talk about politics with him.
Eighteen years wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I don’t know how I’m going to live the rest of my life without him and have to deal with seeing his face in the mirror every single morning for the rest of my life and know that he will never be here again no matter how badly I want it.
If you still talk to you dad, please, for me, hug them and tell you them you love them and talk to them and ask them about their lives because I can’t anymore.
Every day when I look in the mirror I’m reminded that I inherited his face, and hair, and skin, and weird knobby knees. I took on his propensity for computer programming, forests, kayaking, reading, socialism, damaged people, and introversion as well. But I desperately wish that I could have somehow picked up just an ounce of his seemingly boundless optimism in the short amount of time I got to share with him, and I feel like I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to be even a quarter as good as he was.
Every day I wish I could see his smile one more time, every day I wish I could show him my computer projects, or ask him what airplane is flying over head, or go walk in the woods with him. Every day I wish I could sing for him. Every day I wish I could tell him I love him, or tell him what I learned, or talk about politics with him.
Eighteen years wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I don’t know how I’m going to live the rest of my life without him and have to deal with seeing his face in the mirror every single morning for the rest of my life and know that he will never be here again no matter how badly I want it.
If you still talk to you dad, please, for me, hug them and tell you them you love them and talk to them and ask them about their lives because I can’t anymore.
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