He is Forever our Husband, Father, Cousin, Friend, and More

“I’m angry with a dead man, and I just don’t see the point of that.”

—

December 13th 2015 marked my first full year without my father.

And these words mark my first true attempt at trying to verbalize what my first year without him has been like. During a recent therapy session, I found myself saying out loud, “I’m angry with a dead man, and I just don’t see the point of that.”

But what I truly feel is much more complicated than anger. It is something that burns just as hot but feels somehow flimsier than rage. And dizzying. Not only am I not sure of what I feel but, consequently, I’ve found myself wondering who I really am, and where I really am, in light of this glaring change.

Am I angry that he’s gone? Or am I angry that I miss him? Or am I angry that he went and died and has now forced me to miss him for the rest of my life?

I recently finished reading James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, a book of essays where Baldwin intimates how close he was not to his father, and how many people weren’t able to be close to his father — even the ones who wholeheartedly loved him. And yet, even Baldwin couldn’t escape the sentence of longing, of yearning for the familiar, and paternal, for the safe feeling that comes with your smallness because there’s this one person in your life whom you can still look at and think, quite comfortably with its childlike air,

“One day, I’ll be big like him.”

• Fired from your job.

“One day, I’ll be big like him.”

• Spouse wants a divorce.

“One day, I’ll be big like him.”

• Your child says she hates you.

“One day, I’ll be big like him.”

Lately, I’ve wondered if the tragedy of the human experience is that we can never shut off that need for a hero. We can’t look at our wounds and say, “I don’t have time for you right now.” Because, if we could, then when our parents leave us — even when we’re adults — perhaps we’d have power over the urge to look at an empty space where his or her body might have been in one of our weaker moments, and say, “One day, I’ll be big like ….”

Still, my mind chews over the possibilities of what death can and cannot remove. Sometimes, in the most bitter moments, I try to tell myself that what I wrote for his funeral was the product of surging emotions. But, a year later, the words still feel true …

“Today, I look at our father’s death as just another change. I hope that does not make me seem delusional. I ache over the fact that I’ll never feel the warmth of his lips against my forehead again. And I feel nauseated at the knowledge that the hands with which he protected me and my family so intently will never again move.

But love is realer than the heartbeats in our chests. Laughter is stronger than the lungs with which we create it. And our father was made up of these kinds of enduring qualities and more, teaching us that a man can actually become something greater than his hands, and his voice, and his smile, no matter how exquisite they all are. He can also become a legacy, a fingerprint on the soul, as real and unseen as heat from the sun.

Our bodies will never feel the warmth of Cornelius Charles Lucas again but, thankfully, our lives will never be able to escape it.

We are forever his family.

He is forever our husband, father, cousin, friend, and more.”

 

Photo Credit: 白士 李/Flickr