I have always felt life at its edges, the weather before it turns, the mood beneath a room’s small talk, the meaning that lives just under what is said. To feel this way is its own kind of gift and its own kind of weather. When my emotional life slips out of balance, I feel the walls of it close in, the way a low sky presses down on the water. And so, for as long as I can remember, I have reached toward the spiritual. It has always struck me as the most hopeful thing there is, boundless, patient, unwilling to end where the visible ends. Faith, practice, and a quiet trust in the unseen are what have carried me through.
I lost my father when I was sixteen. And yet my relationship with him has never been stronger than it is right now.
There are not many people left in my life, outside my family, who knew him and can say his name the way you say the name of someone you actually sat across from. So when his name does turn up, unexpectedly, in someone else’s mouth, my heart leaps before I can think. It is such a small thing and such an enormous thing all at once: to hear him spoken of by someone who remembers.
Not long ago, I had lunch with my cousin. Being with him is one of my great pleasures. He asks the best questions, and he is a magnificent listener, the kind who makes you feel that whatever you are about to say already matters. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, he asked me, gently: Do you still feel your father? Do you still have a relationship with him, after all these years?
I didn’t answer right away. Not because I was unsure, I have never been more sure of anything, but because I wanted to do the question justice. I wanted to bring my cousin all the way into my inner world, to let him see what lives there, and to let him know how much his asking meant in that exact moment.
Some questions are a door held open. This was one of them.
And as I gathered my answer, I felt again how solid the ground beneath my relationship with my father is. How rock-solid. How unshakeable, after nearly five decades.
Lately, I have been sharing something new with my dad. An awareness that is complicated and simple at the very same time, the way the truest things tend to be.
Here is the simple, aching part. I would have given anything for him to live longer. To have watched his children grow up. To have held his grandchildren, to have learned their names and their faces and their particular laughs. I wanted that for him, and for us, more than I have words for. But that was not written. On June 28, 1978, the whole course of my life changed in a single day.
And here is the complicated part, the part I have spent a lifetime learning to hold: something magnificent grew out of this loss. Not despite it, because of it. The very sensitivity I described, the lifelong reaching toward the spiritual, the relationship of the spirit that I have given my work, my heart, and my one life to, all of it has its roots in the ground of his absence. He has guided me in ways I never could have imagined. And the truth I can no longer pretend around is that none of it would have happened had he lived.
So yes. To my cousin, and to anyone who has ever wondered whether love can keep its shape after a person is gone — yes, I still feel my father. More than feel him: I am in conversation with him still. He did not stay long enough to see my life unfold, and yet he has been present for every part of it. The relationship we have now, made partly of memory and partly of mystery, is the most enduring of my life.
I would still hand it all back for one more ordinary afternoon with him. And I am who I am because I could not. Both of those things are true. I have stopped asking them to resolve and started letting them be true together, which may be the closest thing to peace I know.
If his name comes up in my world this week, my heart will leap. It means that someone still remembers him, and that remembering is its own kind of keeping him close.
Always love. ♥️
From my corner by the sea,
Sarah
