A Dad Shaped Space
Grief isn’t just missing what was—it’s missing what never got to be. Losing my dad young meant learning to live with the absence that shaped me.
I was six when my dad died. Young enough that I hardly remember the funeral, but old enough to know something was wrong. Old enough to know that a dad is supposed to be there, supposed to come home at night, supposed to be in the stands at games, supposed to be someone you can call when your car won’t start. But mine wasn’t.
People talk about grief like it’s this sharp, unbearable thing, like a wound you have to nurse until it scabs over. But when you lose someone that young, it’s not like that. It’s not one moment of loss. It’s a slow unraveling, a quiet kind of absence you keep discovering over and over again. You lose them in layers. At seven, you lose them in a simple way: they were here, and now they aren’t. But then, you keep losing them. When Father’s Day rolls around at school and they tell you to make a card. When you hear other kids complain about their dads. How they nag too much, embarrass them in public, try too hard to be funny. You don’t know what to say, because you would give anything to have that. To roll your eyes at a dumb joke, to argue about curfews, to have someone who cares enough to frustrate you. But instead, you just nod along, because missing someone who’s supposed to be there isn’t something you can casually bring up in a conversation.
I don’t remember him the way other people do. I don’t have vivid memories of road trips or lectures or inside jokes. I don’t have the stories people pull out at gatherings, the ones that define a relationship, the ones you use to say this is who he was. I don’t know what his favorite movie was. I don’t know if he drank his coffee black or with too much sugar. I don’t know if we would’ve had the same sense of humor or if we would have argued about politics or if he would’ve been the kind of dad who texts every day just to check in. I’m told all the answers for these, but I will never know for myself.
And that’s the part that gets me the most. There’s no version of him that exists in my head that belongs to me alone. Everything I know about him has been filtered through other people. Secondhand memories, passed down like heirlooms I’m supposed to cherish even though I never really got to hold them myself.
“You look just like him.”
“He was the funniest guy in the room.”
“He would’ve been so proud of you.”
People say these things with good intentions, and I try to take them the way they mean them. I try to hold onto them like they’re something real, something solid. But they don’t fill the gap. They don’t bring him back. If anything, they make him feel more like a myth, a story I’ve been told so many times that I’m supposed to believe I knew him. But I didn’t. Not really.
But there are moments I try to make real. Small rituals, little things I do that make me feel like I know him, even if it’s just in my own way. Today is his birthday. I don’t have memories of celebrating with him, no recollection of candles or cakes or gifts, but I still mark the day. Every year, I get some Oatmeal Cream Pies from the gas station he brought my brother and I to as children and watch Trailer Park Boys. I don’t even know if that’s what he’d be doing if he were here, but it’s what I do. It’s how I keep him close. Maybe that’s what grief turns into after enough time. Not just missing someone, but finding ways to pull them back into the world, even if it’s just for a night.
And that’s what losing a parent young is, I think. It’s not just missing them. It’s missing the chance to know them. It’s missing all the versions of them you were supposed to meet. The dad who embarrasses you in front of your friends when you’re thirteen. The dad who lectures you about money when you’re sixteen. The dad who helps you move into your first apartment, who tells you to call if anything breaks, who answers even when it’s late and you’re drunk and just need to hear a familiar voice.
Instead, he exists in pieces. A few old photos, ones where he looks familiar but not quite real. A couple of stories that have been told so many times I can’t tell if they’re true or just the way people want to remember him. The way people’s faces change when they talk about him. How they get soft, how their voices drop just a little. Like he was something rare, something they still can’t believe is gone.
And I think that’s what makes it so strange. The fact that he was real, once. That he walked and laughed and drove home from work and sat in traffic and had favorite songs and bad habits and things he wanted to do but never got to. That he was someone outside of being my dad, and I’ll never know that person.
I wonder about him all the time. Not just the big things: what kind of dad he would’ve been, if he would’ve been strict or easygoing, if we would’ve been close. But the little things, too. Would he have liked the music I listen to? Would he have been good at texting back? What kind of car would he have driven? Would he have smelled like cologne or motor oil or fig newtons? Would he have made bad dad jokes? Would he have been the kind of dad who embarrasses you in front of your friends, or the kind who somehow makes them all like him more than they like you?
I think about what it would’ve been like to argue with him. To get annoyed with him. To be grounded by him. People always talk about missing the good things, but sometimes, I wish I had the bad things to miss, too. The stupid fights. The moments where I rolled my eyes. The times he would’ve told me no when I wanted him to say yes. Because those are real things. Those are things that make a person whole.
Instead, he exists in shadows. In the way I get quiet when I’m mad. In the way I always double-check that I have gas before a long drive, because I feel like he would’ve told me to. In the way I sometimes see glimpses of him in myself, in a passing reflection, in a mannerism I don’t remember learning. He’s not there, but he’s everywhere.
People ask if it gets easier. I never know how to answer that. It doesn’t get easier, but it gets different. You stop expecting to see them on the weekend. You stop thinking of them every single day. But then you hear a song they used to play in the car, or you see someone with their same walk, and for a second, it all crashes back.
Losing a parent young is a strange kind of grief. It’s not like losing a limb, it’s like never having one in the first place and being expected to know what it would’ve felt like. It’s looking at your life and seeing the space they should have filled.
It’s carrying the weight of a name, a memory, a shadow, and never quite knowing where to put it.
Eli, I'm sorry you lost your dad when you were so young, when he was so young. I'm also impressed that you wrote such an insightful account of your experience of your non-experience with your dad and your non-memories of him. Also that you wrote it so well.
I can relate to some of what you wrote, but my experience was, for the most part, quite different from yours. I was 14 when my suddenly dad died. I had gotten to spend a lot of time with him by then, so I do have lots of personal memories to go with the stories I've heard from others. I do have personal insights into who he was, both for me and for others. And that's been good for me. At the same time, I also wish I had even more memories ... there are never enough.
As I recall him, as I recall having recalled him so many times, I can feel what you're missing. It seems to me that I can guess pretty well how I might feel if all that I'm able to recall of him were instead just emptiness, or only stories from others. But, because I do have those memories, I can't fully know the emptiness and the wondering that you're experiencing.
One thing I do know, though, is that stories from others are, to some extent, just stories that others happen to remember and that they are only the way they want to remember him. On one level, they're whitewashed to feel better, to feel good, more so from some people than from others. Also, stories are limited to what each person paid attention to, and most people are pretty limited in what they pay attention to. Collectively, though, from everyone who has shared stories, there are consistent patterns and themes that I think present a more reliable picture. And I find that those patterns and themes feel real to me in that they are consistent with my own impressions and memories – the kinds of impressions and memories that you are unfortunately missing. This suggests to me that perhaps the stories you've heard about your dad might, collectively, present some consistent patterns and themes that you could rely on as being more real in their telling even if they don't feel real to you from your experiencing. But there will certainly be lots that other people didn't pay attention to about your dad, things that others totally missed, things that he might have done a good job of hiding, even.
What I wish that I had been able to have was an adult-to-adult relationship with my dad. Adults relating with each other have different sorts of discussions, different types of sharing that I missed out on. Consequently, I've tried sometimes to imagine how it might have been for me as an adult to talk about stuff with him. Also, as an adult, especially as I've gotten older, I wonder about all sorts of things I never learned about him, that I never even heard about him from others. There are lots of questions I would have liked to ask about his younger life, about how it was to be the oldest child out of eight, and about how it was to drop out of school after eighth grade to start working to help the family as the "second man" of the household. He was still just a kid. I don't even know what his first job was. I don't know what he liked as a kid, what he worried about, what he just thought about things, how he got along with his parents and siblings, who his friends were, what he did for fun or if he got into trouble at all. Lots of questions with no answers, no clues, no stories from others, very few old photos. I could have asked my mother or my dad's siblings, but I didn't really think to do that before it was too late, before they were all gone, too.
My only suggestion for you is to ask questions. Not necessarily just about your dad, but also questions of your mother and other family members, both immediate and extended family. Even if you think you know a whole lot about someone, there's always more you could learn, little stuff, stuff you'll wonder about when you get older ... like me. Go through old photos and ask who all the people are – someday you'll wonder but won't have anyone to ask. Once in a while as you're doing this, you might pick up something more about your dad, too, something to help you fill in a few little blanks. I have a few bits and pieces about my dad that I'll never really know more about, but I do find it interesting to contemplate some bit and expand it into broader wondering that, speculative though it may be, is still interesting as a way to contemplate possibilities. It's not the same as a memory, but I feel it does help create a reasonable context within which I can perhaps better understand my dad based on what I actually do know about him.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your thoughts here and I also appreciate your prompt for me to delve a bit into contemplating my own dad and the knowns and unknowns around him. Take care and be well.