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 18. 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.
Today is my dad’s birthday.
He would have hated me saying that out loud. That was him. He didn’t want the fuss. Didn’t want the attention. He would sit there with those dimples he could never quite hide and wave the whole thing off like it was nothing, like we were all making too big a deal out of an ordinary day.
It was never an ordinary day to us.
We celebrated him anyway. The cake. The noise of it. The way the whole room felt fuller just because he was in it. He showed up for everything quietly, without needing to be the center of it, and somehow ended up being the center of it anyway. That was just who he was.
I woke up thinking about him this morning.
I sat down at my desk to write his chapter.
Coffee. Notes open. The chapter pulled up on the screen. My hands on the keyboard.
And I watched the cursor blink.
Because somewhere between sitting down and putting my hands on the keys a thought walked in and sat down and wouldn’t move.
Chris is 58.
My father never made it to 58.
He was 56 when he died.
I sat there and let that land. Really land. The man I have loved for forty years has already outlived my father. Already passed the age my father never got to reach. And sitting at my desk on his birthday I felt the weight of that in a way I was not prepared for.
And then the memories came.
The drive to Washington Hospital Center. Every single day for three months. An hour each way. You get in the car and you go because there is nothing else to do. You sit beside him in the ICU and you hold hope the way you hold something fragile. Carefully. With both hands. Not too tight. You watch the machines. You learn the language of that place. You talk to the nurses. You stay as long as they let you.
And then you drive home.
That was its own kind of hard.
Some days he was stronger and the drive home felt like you could breathe again. Some days he was not and you drove home in the dark with something sitting in your chest that had no name and no place to go. Just the road and the dark and whatever you carried out of that room.
I did that for three months.
I sat at my desk today on his birthday and felt every single mile of it.
I thought about the man who didn’t want a fuss made over him. The man who loved quietly, with his hands, with the thing he could do instead of the thing he could not say. The man who walked me down the aisle trying to hold back tears and not quite managing it. The man whose slides were wrapped in Thai newspaper in a brown cardboard box waiting in my closet for twenty four years because I was not ready.
I am ready now.
And then I wrote anyway.
I wrote through the grief the way you drive through the dark — not because it gets easier but because stopping is not an option. Because he deserves to have his story told. Because the box has been waiting twenty four years and I am the one who has to open it all the way.
Word by word. Sentence by sentence. All of it.
I finished the chapter.
And when I typed the last word I just sat there.
Completely empty. Completely still. The particular emptiness that comes after you have gone somewhere hard and made it all the way through to the other side. Not sad exactly. Not relieved exactly. Just drained in the way that only happens when you have given something everything you had.
There is a chapter in this book about what those three months looked like. About what hope actually looks like when it stops being a feeling and becomes something you do with your hands every single day. About the flag folded with the kind of care that does not perform itself. About finding the box wrapped in Thai newspaper when I cleaned out his house after.
The box that started all of this.
I wrote it today on his birthday.
I think he would have liked that.
He would have waved it off. Told me it was no big deal. Smiled with those dimples he could never hide.
But he would have liked it.
Happy birthday, Dad.
I still feel you everywhere.
