Disclosure: I have not experienced the death of an immediate family member or very close friend. I think this makes me insufficiently prepared to write about the death of a loved one. However, this Father’s Day, I feel compelled to consider the death of my father.
This isn’t the first time having a deceased dad has crossed my mind. Nearly two decades ago, as a pragmatic young adult with an interest in personal finance, various books and blogs advised that I talk with my parents about what their final wishes would be after they died. The conversations were not awkward for me, and they didn’t seem uncomfortable for my mom or dad either. In fact, they were very open about their wishes. My dad gave me contact information for his financial advisor, a combination to a locked safe filled with valuables, and explicit instructions on how to handle some of his prized possessions. We discussed estate planning casually over the course of many years. My dad trusted me. He was also proud of me. He told me so, often.
He also often told me about something I imagine many fathers and daughters don’t talk about casually: he told me about more than a few creative concepts for his own funeral. My dad had a strange sense of humor about funerals. Apparently, he wasn’t alone, since there was a reality television show dedicated to the kind of extreme funerals that he often joked about wanting for himself. Smirking, he’d share his ideas for a memorial of the millennium incorporating pyrotechnics, animatronics, voice-of-God sound effects, and of course a customary rifle salute in accordance with his military service and passion, no, obsession, with all things arms. He expressed wanting his funeral to be the most memorable funeral that anyone ever went to. Even as he regularly regaled me about how spectacular he wanted his funeral to be, I never really considered that one day, he would, in fact, have a funeral. And regardless of the improbability that he would get any of the theatrics he’d dreamt of, what was much more probable would be that I would likely be there, and I, undoubtedly, would be mourning him deeply.
Fast forward to today, and I can’t definitively say whether or not he is even alive. If he has passed or should pass away in the future, how would I know? Do I just occasionally check the internet? That is how I found out about his last major life change. According to the internet, he remarried years ago. Since he never told his adult children he was taking a new wife, perhaps he never told her about us? I don’t know if my stepmother knows she has stepchildren or step-grandchildren, so I can’t count on her to seek me out to deliver any news about him.
His only other surviving family member that I can think of that would notify me of his passing would be his only sibling. My dad’s older sister was among my closest family growing up. When I were young, she hosted my sister and I for sleepovers; there was even a room in her house that she said was just for us! When I was older and interning for a company in her neighborhood, I’d take lunchbreaks with her on her patio. Our family celebrated birthdays, graduations, weddings, and nearly all major holidays together. Then once my dad ghosted, so did she and her husband. Although, she used to be the one who spread the word about deaths in our family, I don’t count on her to contact me since according to her last text to me in 2016, she is waiting for “an opportune time” for us to talk.
Needless to say, I don’t know how I’d know about my father’s death. While that realization saddens me, what cuts even deeper is that I don’t know how I’d feel about learning about my dad’s death. I fully recognize that his abandonment is not the same as his mortality. One day, if or when I experience the death of a loved one, I will be better able to gauge the differences in grief between the loss of a relationship and the loss of life. Until then, the ambiguous grief I’ve experienced from my dad’s perpetual absence is the worst grief I’ve experienced thus far in my life.
Not having him around for so long seems like it may take the sting out of what would otherwise be the devastating news of his passing. Or perhaps it is the opposite, because so much time was lost, I’ll be even more hurt about the previous years we’ve wasted apart. From my limited yet valid perspective, because of the clear difference in the good dad I had before he left my family years ago without warning and the gone dad I have now who from what I can tell, purposefully keeps me and his other offspring out of his life, ultimately losing the latter doesn’t seem like it would hurt nearly as much as the abstract loss the former.
