Aug 22 | A Blank Cassette, Part 1 (Letters from the Coast)

This is another multi-part entry, on the death of my dad.

 

PART I: THE SILENCE BETWEEN US

Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 70.

I’ve written about him and his sudden death on here a few times. Grieving him has been long and complicated. He was a very taciturn person whose love always felt a bit…theoretical.

I have trouble with Jesus’s use of the word “Father” for God for exactly this reason. I imagine that, for many people, the relationship I had with my dad would feel quite similar to the postmodern relationship to God: mostly built on silence and rather inscrutable. It took a very long time for me to be able to listen to the love hanging unspoken in that silence.

I decided when I was about twenty-five or so that I was going to change the relationship. I wanted to risk breaking that silence. I wanted to speak the love that hung unspoken.

Part of it was that I realized that I had spent a few years wishing my relationship with my dad was more communicative, more open. And I had learned about my dad’s very difficult and rather sad childhood, and it made me feel more sympathy for him.

I thought, “You know, it’s probably a lot easier for a 25-year-old to risk change than it is for a 60-year-old.”

And, “I’m an adult now. I have the ability to make my own choices. I can’t just expect this without putting in my own work.”

It started so small. I ended a phone call with, “Okay, Dad – love you!”

I remember thinking, It has to start with this. What if he dies tomorrow and I never remember saying ‘I love you’?

I could tell he was taken aback. When I tell people the story verbally they always laugh when I impersonate his reaction. “Oh… (cough) I…br…love you too.”

I made other small movements toward him. All seemed successful. It was hard to tell. But Dad was in a good place anyway. He had moved and was really fitting well into the community. Everyone loved him. He had a band. He was writing his own songs for the first time.

I felt myself working up to a big moment. I wanted it to be on my thirtieth birthday.

I have a strong feeling that I actually talked to him about it the last time I saw him alive, about two months before he died.

I wanted to go fishing. I hadn’t been fishing with him since I was about twelve. And I wanted to end the day with laying down some tracks in his basement. We had done a couple the Christmas before, just with his iPhone, and I was impressed with the sound quality.

He seemed almost excited about it.

It never happened.

Instead of fishing, I went to a funeral.

Instead of laying down tracks in the basement, we spread his ashes at the top of the Sea to Sky gondola. They blew away and I forgot what Alleluia meant for a long time.

The silence between us became so, so deep.