An Eternal Summer

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” — Joan Didion

I recall frequently a specific day in early June, three years and a few months old (the months seem significant to me now). I am alone in the pool with my father. He holds me in his arms as he tells me that he’s going away, and he’s not coming back, but that he loves me very much. How did he know? How could he have? I wonder if the end was already set in stone, every event preceding it leading to the same inevitable outcome — similar to a commuter with an uneasy feeling on their way to work deciding to take a different route, only to later discover they had narrowly escaped a car crash, a fire, or an armed robbery, except in reverse: my father, possessing a near-psychic sense that something was amiss and yet powerless to stop it, continued barreling toward the end.

Now, I search for answers where none can be found, sincere in my belief that if I can analyze the facts enough that maybe I will find some resolution. What day of the week was it? What time? How did our day start, was it like every day before? Waking up next to him on the futon at my grandmother’s house, following him downstairs and sitting in silence as we ate our bowls of frosted Wheaties. Or were things already shifted a few inches to the left, a different cereal had for breakfast, the carton of milk empty? Was the sky already a bit greyed, something different in the air, as my childhood crumbled around me? Why him? Why me?

Research says that children under five do not understand what death means. That a person can exist, and then not exist, is an abstraction too advanced for brains that are still so literal, so concrete. To children this young, death is understood merely as a separation: impermanent, reversible. Daddy is coming back, I would say. And when he did not, I hate God, I would say. I remember a new phone book arriving in the mail one day at my grandmother’s house. Can you call heaven so I can talk to Daddy? I asked. I did not relent when she told me that that wasn’t possible, so perseverant in my conviction that he was out there and could be found, as if it was all a fluke and I had cracked the code.

When did I understand with finality that my father, in fact, was not coming back? In some childish way, I think the answer is never. Still I believe, somewhat in earnest, that if I can uncover every piece of information, some seismic universal shift will take me back, change the timeline and bring back the only person who has ever been missing in my world. Instead that day in June is benign, and we eat the right cereal and the air is fresh and the sky is blue. I’ll see him next weekend, and the one after that, and the cereal will always be the same and when I wake up in the morning he’ll be right there. The phone book sits untouched in the cabinet. In a year I’ll go to kindergarten, and he’ll meet my teacher, and he’ll cry when he drops me off because I know he would, because it’s the type of father he always was.

What haunts me the most? Is it the suddenness? Or is it everything that came after — the perpetual, inescapable lack that marks every accomplishment, every milestone, every phone call I never get to make? I buy a condo and my mom remarks that my walls need a fresh coat of paint, that my dad would have it done in an hour, and later that night I cry in bed. A colleague asks, so what do your parents do for work? And in two decades I still have not figured out an appropriate response to the plural s, parents.

Maybe it’s the not knowing, the questions forever left unanswered. What happened? If I did know, could I find peace? Everything I know I see only in fragments, a disjointed story that feels incomprehensible in its weight. The day at the pool, the road trip from which he never returned, the tragedy that followed. A ripple effect of lives permanently altered by the actions of one. My world one person too light, its center no longer in equilibrium, forever tipped on its axis. The people around me seemingly in perfect balance as I stumble, always a bit unsteady in my footing.

I don’t think the lack ever goes away. My life is punctuated by it, in the mundane and extraordinary alike. I look for my dad on every street corner, the sky in its shades of grey, blue and black, the fields of grass I dissolve into on the days I don’t feel human. In a song, in a book, in the words I write. Always searching, beckoning, calling out to him. In the depths of my grief I unravel and recreate myself, again and again, each time reemerging as something more complete. Something vulnerable and raw in all my hurt, because it is a gift to grieve, because it keeps him with me.

I don’t believe in platitudes, continually repeated by those uncomfortable with and stranger to death. Everything happens for a reason and God only ever gives you what you can handle and He’s in a better place now. As if the only place I’ve ever wanted him to be isn’t right next to me. I don’t believe my dad’s death meant anything, or that tragedy was bestowed upon me because I can handle it, or that it happened for some ever-unspecified reason.

I don’t believe in cliches, but I do believe that my dad would want me to carry myself with love and grace, forever in his light. I find him in the sunlight peeking through the blinds in the early hours of the morning and I remember how it felt to wake up on the futon, one side heavy and warm from his body next to mine.

Somewhere we are suspended in an eternal summer. Somewhere it is June, and I am three (and a few months, because again the months matter), and we are at the pool and the benevolent sun casts freckles on my soft skin, and the summer days, with their endless heat all melt into one. When we return from the pool I will eat a cherry popsicle, and I will fall asleep on the couch in my beach towel and I will wake up to cartoons on the TV and my dad will be there, because he always is. And it will always be June, and I will always be three, and every day my soft curls will be damp with chlorine, and my lips and my small fingers will be cold and stained from cherry popsicles. I will never know what is on the other side of the summer that never ends, will never need to.