haunting
how do you get to know someone who’s already gone?
i’ve realized that i know so little about my dad. when he was still around, i was still too young to see him as anything more than a parent. truthfully speaking, i know more about my friends’ fathers than my own. it feels ironic and stupid then, that i grieve him so deeply. a dead person can only introduce themself through whatever they’ve left behind: people, places, things… but i’m still too afraid to speak about him out loud. i say this all the time, but i know it’s still true. i know i can, but some topics are worse than others.1
i could only resort to google. i found brief mentions of him in articles from his work, listings in fandom wikias (this was also surprising to me), pictures in wordpress blogs, and a snippet of his voice in an (almost? viral) video circulating social media. i hadn’t even realized that i had forgotten what he sounded like.2
then i looked through our ‘clan’s’ facebook group. there is probably a more fitting word to be used here, but i just mean that a lot of people sharing our last name were in there. people would join and ask about how they were connected to the family tree. i learned the names of my great-grandfathers and their place in history. i saw pictures of them with national heroes & pictures of our ancestral home. names and places vaguely familiar to me, mentioned maybe once or twice in conversations in my childhood.
i eventually found the black & white images of my dad and his siblings3 and i couldn’t go any further than that. the wound is still too tender, even after all this time. i can't tell if it's healing or giving way to rot.
something to revisit another day.
it’s my fault he died. i could have saved him. (i've been told not to blame myself but that's just something easier said than done!) it came up a bit recently and i had to leave the table.↩
we have a life-size cutout of him at home and my mom still wears his cologne for special occasions. (it’s strong. she only has to spray once. i haven’t asked her what she’ll do when it runs out.) but his voice still somehow slipped through the cracks. i can feel time washing the traces of him away.↩
i’ve thought about asking them about him, but our relationship has been strained since he passed.↩