My dad passed away when I was young.
I want to say I was 10 when it happened, although I might have been 11. Truth be told, I’ve always been embarrassed that I can never remember. So, when people ask, I opt instead to simply say I was young.
He had cancer. First of his colon, so they removed that. Then of his lungs, so they removed one of them too. Unfortunately, once more, the cancer moved — this time to his brain.
Apparently doctors can’t remove brains, so then he died.
It’s weird when you lose a parent at that age because you feel like you should have been old enough to remember more than you do. But, at least personally, I can’t remember much.
There are a few things I do remember though.
The most vivid being every night when he brushed my hair, and then my brother’s. I can remember the way he parted our hair, always to the left (his right). I can even remember the brush itself; electric blue, white bristles, and the handle snapped off.
I don’t know why I can recall those nights so clearly—as if it had happened yesterday—but I do. Sometimes I wonder why that was the snapshot my brain chose to save when the rest of the camera roll was dumped.
But I think that was maybe just a really good example of how little say we have when it comes to choosing the moments that eventually matter.
This all might sound sad at this point, but I promise it isn’t meant to be. Instead this is me, thinking on a plane, and saving those thoughts here.
Speaking of being sad though:
In the months following my dad’s passing, I remember feeling absolutely zero sadness at all. I wasn’t happy, mind you, but it just felt as if nothing was wrong. I knew there was. Clearly. But it didn’t feel like it.
People reached out, told me they were sorry, and always added some sort of line about them “knowing how hard this is.”
Every time someone said that, I remember feeling this increasing sense of guilt due to it not being hard at all. But because I thought that sounded fucking psychotic, not caring much at all that my father had just died, I played the part and said what I thought I was supposed to say.
That void of emotion lasted for months. Never once crying. Until one day, in the middle of summer, I tried to remember his voice — but couldn’t. Suddenly, I was sad. Suddenly, I cried.
And I think maybe that was the first time I stumbled across a really good example of how individual the mourning process was and how little say we have when it comes to riding that wave.
In the years since, I’ve heard plenty of stories of him.
So many, in fact, that I oftentimes wonder how many of the memories I possess are actually just stories that were shared and I unknowingly adopted ownership of.
Over the years, of the stories I heard, some were good, some bad, some true, and some probably not so true. But, after hearing so many, there were a few qualities that remained consistent no matter who was telling the story and how they felt about him.
And those consistent qualities were that he wasn’t extremely intelligent on a technical level, that he had trouble handling his own emotions, and that he cared an awful fucking lot.
He was bad. Sometimes really bad. But he was also good. And sometimes he was really good too.
And more often than not those were the two qualities that drove his life; a misguided man with more emotion in his heart than maybe he knew how to handle.
All his friends would go on and on about how good of a friend he was.
They’d speak about how fun he was. And they’d speak about how loyal he was. And then, occasionally, they’d slip in a story of him getting too drunk, lashing out, and being unable to control his anger.
My mother would share love letters that he had written her, letting me read them and later keep them. He wasn’t a good writer. But he tried, and he tried because he cared. A lot.
But, more frequently than I got to read letters, I received stories of drug abuse, emotional outbursts, and fights flirting so closely with physicality that it was hard not to paint him as a monster.
No matter who I talked to, the stories (true, false, or embellished) continually possessed the same few consistencies: a lot of really good, and a lot of really bad. Never one. Always both.
It took me a long time to find peace with the fact I’d never truly know my dad. I wouldn’t know what his favorite food was or what he’d think of the music I listen to. I wouldn’t know what he thought of my tattoos and I wouldn’t know if he ever wanted any of his own. And I wouldn’t know if he regretted his divorce with my mom, and I wouldn’t get to hear what he thought of whomever I had fallen for.
But slowly, maybe not initially, but eventually, I found peace with that.
And, while I can’t say for sure, I’m pretty sure that peace was found when I began to realize that you can understand someone without knowing them. And you can know someone without understanding them. Neither is necessarily better than the other, they’re simply different.
I’d never know my dad. But I do think I grew to understand him.
And with that knowledge I finally found peace.
Over the last week or two that you and I have been talking I (once again) realized that, while I do think I understand you on some level, while I do think we operate on similar wage lengths, there was so much I didn’t know about you.
Which is why I decided to write this. To share with you a memory and a thought.
Because while understanding is maybe found within a feeling, maybe knowing is something that is only found within the moments shared with someone else.
Maybe.
By Nick Sorrell.
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