Father’s Day doesn’t suck. That’s what I wanted to write about tonight. Tonight is Father’s Day Eve, if we can call it such, and tomorrow will be my third Father’s Day as a daughter without a father.
My spirit has been at ease about this, peaceful. I have checked in with myself several times this week, silently asking, “Are you sure?” to my heart, with the equally quiet response being, “I am.”
Examining this, (as it is unexpected) I think I understand why. Tomorrow is a day to celebrate dads. On social media, the posts have already started and I expect my feed to be flooded with photos, reels, and long poetic captions about fatherhood, daughterhood, the bonds of family, gratitude, lessons, lunches, ties and watches, visits, and love. I usually dread it. I turn off my phone and hide in a corner and eat snacks and watch movies to zone out and not feel. Simply put, I avoid it because it will be painful for me.
Allow me to pat myself on the back here and say that I am pretty “ok” at leaning into pain. I would rather do the hard thing and have it hurt like a beech for a moment, than ignore it and drag the pain out for a longer time. And yes, I learned that from my dad. He encouraged us to make ourselves uncomfortable, and would share Marines wisdom with us often. Things like, “Be grateful for the pain; the pain is how you know you’re still alive.” That said, I am human, and I have the capacity for courage and for cowardice in equal measure, so there are times that I am not brave, and I hide from what hurts.
I am a part of an exclusive club that I never wanted to join, a network I am both grateful for and resentful of. The DDC. Dead Dad’s Club. Or maybe it’s the Triple D – Daughters of Deceased Dads. I don’t know. Call it what you want. There are several of us, and I have connected online and in real life with lots of women like myself since being unwillingly inducted. Unfortunately, I have many friends who have lost their fathers in the last few years as well. When I was heavily grieving I started following pages on Instagram that were about grief – how to manage, cope, hide it – and pages that posted about, in particular, living without a dad.
This year, something has changed. I feel a shift happening inside me. Here’s the thing I have noticed after having dozens of conversations and consuming far too much content related to this particular flavor of grief –
We hurt because we loved. We hurt because we WERE loved. We notice someone missing because someone was there. We seek because we were once found.
All of what it means to be in this club is related to having not just a father, but a GOOD father. None of the women in the DDC/DDD had absentee fathers. None of us were abused, abandoned, neglected. We were nurtured, protected, cherished. We feel unlucky and cheated in this loss because we were unbelievably lucky with the dads we got to grow up with, and we enjoyed relationship with them. We all experienced life (most of us 30-40 years of it) with dads who were present, loving, encouraging, uplifting, shining examples of what a man is and should be.
And that is precisely why, even as I move through the day carrying the pieces of my shattered heart in my pocket, Father’s Day doesn’t suck. Why, as I choke back hot tears in order to get through conversation, Father’s Day doesn’t suck. Why, when my friends post about their loved ones I won’t feel a tinge of jealousy. I’m not jealous at all. Father’s Day doesn’t suck, because my Father didn’t suck. He was the very best to do it, and he was mine. He was mine and he loved me, and he loved my kids and we loved him. Father’s Day is not about lamenting loss, even if I feel like every other day of the year is. Father’s Day is still, for me, about fatherhood, daughterhood, the bonds of family, heartfelt gratitude, memories, lunches, love and so much more.
It may not seem like much of an epiphany, but for me it is. I have decided that, even in the worst of circumstances, I still get to celebrate. I am not on the outside looking in at all the people at the party. I join the party (please pass me some cake). For most of my life I had an amazing, kind, generous, brilliant dad. What an enormous gift he was, and his love for me still is. I will eat a steak in his memory and laugh with my kids and cry if I need to. Does that make it easy? Not at all. In fact, it may be extraordinarily painful. But the pain is what lets me know I’m still alive.
Attitude Soup 