I Hope He's Smiling

My Dad was a good man, and I miss him.  I don’t actively ‘miss’ him, per se; I don’t cry or obsess over what happened, at least not regularly.  But when I glance over at the picture next to my desk of my parents and my daughter on Grandparents’ Day at school, my stomach just knots up.  If anyone should be here, it’s him. Don’t get me wrong – I still think my Mom got the short end of the stick and should have had a hell of a lot more time with Emily than she had.  Emily was a chance for her to redeem herself for what she did to me when I was a kid and that chance was cut very short, too short for my liking. But my Dad, it was just different.  He was here to hear her say Grandpa with such enthusiasm it was hard to not cry with joy over it.  He was here to buy her her first bike.  He was here to hear about all of her crazy antics at school and beyond.  And he should be here to hear more of it, to see more of it, to feel more of it.  I hate looking at that picture and remembering how much she made him smile.  My Dad didn’t have a whole lot to smile about in the last year+ of his life, except for her. I knew I could get him to laugh if I told him a crazy Emily story and now, I have to hope and find a way to believe that he sees it all now and he’s with her.  I hope that he is with me sometimes; he was my gravity – he kept my feet on the ground and he kept me upright even when a lot of my world was falling down (or up, I suppose would be the right analogy) around me. 

I have a bunch of voicemails saved on my phone from him and I know that I can listen to them when I’m ready to. It’s not like my Mom’s – she left me one voicemail, on my birthday two years ago, and it’s the only one I have.  She died so horribly, and I had to watch it happen, and it happened so unexpectedly, I can’t listen to it.  She was gone just too soon.  Way too soon.  My Dad was different – although it wasn’t expected, I wasn’t totally shocked in the end.  He went through a lot and survived much longer than anyone expected. So instead of the shock and trauma and all of the stuff that came with my Mom’s passing – which included having to wrap my head around the fact that she had cancer for all that time and we didn’t know, now I just feel sadness and a sense of ‘wrong’ in the world now that he’s gone.  I’ll never take this picture down, it will sit on or near any desk I have, but it hurts to look at it now that he’s gone.  To see him so happy, and to know that I won’t see that again, hurts. I miss him so very much.