Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 15. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I wrote about losing a parent this week.
Specifically the part I did not know about until after.
Chris got the call at three in the morning. He did not wake me. He sat alone in the dark and held the worst news of our lives by himself and let me sleep.
I asked him once why he didn’t wake me.
I will never forget what he said.
You were about to have the worst day of your life. I couldn’t take that day away from you. But I could let it start later. I wanted you to sleep.
Losing a parent is not one moment.
I know that now in a way I did not know before I started writing this book. People tell you it gets easier. And in some ways that is true. The sharp edges soften. You learn to move around it.
But easier is not the same as gone. It is still there. It is always still there.
Losing a parent does not end. It changes. It goes quiet for a while and you think you have found solid ground and then something finds you and you are back in it. Not all the way back. But back enough to know it never fully left.
It comes back in the ordinary. A smell. My father smoked a pipe. Not constantly. Just sometimes, the way some men do when they are thinking something through. I have not lived in the same house as that smell since I was a child.
I smell it sometimes and I stop completely.
Everything stops.
That is losing a parent. Twenty-four years later and a pipe on the wind and I am back in the same room as him. Just for a second. Just long enough to feel the distance.
I have been losing my father since 2001.
I am still losing him.
Some weeks more than others.
What nobody tells you about losing a parent is what it does to time.
It splits it. Before and after. There is the person you were when they were alive and the person you became when they weren’t and those two people are connected but they are not the same. You carry the before-person with you. You hear his voice sometimes. You are the one who still reaches for the phone to call him. You are the one who forgets, for just a moment, and then remembers.
The remembering never gets faster.
You would think after twenty-four years it would stop catching you off guard. It does not. It just catches you differently. Less like a fall. More like a step you did not see coming. Still enough to knock the breath out of you. Still enough to make you stop whatever you are doing and just stand there for a moment.
I have done a lot of standing there this week.
What nobody tells you about losing a parent is what it does to the ordinary.
The ordinary becomes unbearable in ways you do not expect. Not the big things. The big things you prepare for. The first birthday without them. The first Christmas. The first time you go to pick up the phone and then put it back down.
You prepare for those.
What you do not prepare for is the lasagna.
My father taught me how to make it. His hands showing my hands. The way you learn something not from reading it but from standing next to someone in a kitchen while they show you.
I made it three times this week. Not because I got it wrong the first time. I got it close the first time. Close enough to recognize him in it.
I made it three times this week because I needed more time with him.
That is losing a parent. You find the ways you can still be in the same room as them. For me this week it was the stove. His recipe in my Florida kitchen. His hands in mine. Three pans of lasagna because two was not enough and I was not ready to stop.
What nobody tells you about losing a parent is what it does to your understanding of love.
You think you know what love is. You have built a life on it. Forty years of marriage. Children. Grandchildren. A kitchen that has fed all of them. You think you understand what it means to love someone and be loved back.
And then you are writing about the night your father passed and you remember that your husband sat alone in the dark at three in the morning with the worst news of your life and did not wake you.
He sat alone in the dark so your worst day could start later.
I have been thinking about that all week. What it cost him to hold that alone. What it looked like, him sitting there in the quiet house, carrying it by himself, not because he had to but because he loved me enough to take that onto himself so I did not have to.
That is not a small thing.
That is not something you learn about a person in a year or five years or ten.
That is forty years of knowing someone.
That is what loving someone for a long time actually looks like. Not the gestures. Not the anniversaries. The three in the morning. The dark. The choice to sit alone with the worst thing so the person you love can sleep a little longer.
Losing a parent teaches you things about the people around you that you could not have learned any other way.
It strips everything back. The noise, the routine, the ordinary busyness of a life. And what is left is just the people. Who shows up. Who sits with you. Who holds the call in the dark.
Chris has shown up every single time.
Not loudly. Not in a way that makes it about him. Quietly. Completely. The way he has always done everything. A scanner on the kitchen counter without a word. A cup of coffee set beside the laptop without interrupting. An arm around my shoulders on a couch in Florida while twenty-four years of slides come through a machine and change me.
He has been there for all of it.
I am writing this book because my parents deserve to have their story told. Because my mother’s recipes deserve to live somewhere outside her hands. Because my father’s slides deserve to be more than a box in a closet.
But I am also writing it because of Chris.
Because losing a parent shows you what you have. Because grief, real grief, the kind that lasts twenty-four years and comes back through a scanner on a Tuesday, also shows you the people who love you in the dark.
I have one of those.
I did not always understand what that meant.
I am starting to understand it now.
I could not write after I got that part down this week. I just sat there.
Then I went and found him in the other room.
I did not say anything.
He knew.
He always knows.
That is what losing a parent does to you, if you are lucky.
It shows you exactly who is sitting in the dark.
