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When I think about my dad, it is with precision. It is with perfect clarity. The memories don’t hesitate for even one second. They are so available to me that I often have to shift focus consciously, or I will drift—passively, happily—into a daydream memory of watching his brown rubber fishing boots walk down some wooden steps to the beach. A whole year has passed since he died. And the infinite, glistening strings of recollections are like a gigantic, fixed wind chime; clinking and twinkling pleasantly in my mind. I just paused for a moment and remembered that he always cut my sandwiches like I was a child. Even as an adult, he would bring me soft-breaded tuna sandwiches sliced into two neat triangles with crushed potato chips on them. Sometimes crustless. Time, unfortunately, has not made my dad’s death feel more palatable. It feels like my heart is broken, freshly and irreparably. It feels like I couldn’t possibly talk about him without crying my eyes out but I must because I just remembered that he would play “It’s Only A Paper Moon” by Ella Fitzgerald on his jukebox every time I came to visit and we would sway in this silly way depending on how awkward of an age I was during that particular visit. A year has passed and I am still stunned at how his death looms over all my other life events. I try to recall moments from labor or birth and they plead with me a bit for focus. They are not right there because they know that right now, they have to wait behind a million-memory-long line of all the times my dad and I played tetherball or frisbee, and how he let me set all the radio presets in his car to pop music even though I wasn’t in the car very often, and how when I said goodbye to him before he died I felt like my whole sense of self became unmoored from reality because surely nothing could be this unrealistically painful. When I think about my dad, it is almost always not a memory of the final month of his life. Those memories are even more present, but they are still too dangerous to hang around with for long. When I let one linger among the other chimes, I have to temper it with boat trips to hike around Blake Island and sea spray and adrenaline from chasing after big waves left in the wake of passing barges. I have to do this because if I listen to the jingle of the last month for too long, I struggle for a second to remember how to go on for another year without him.
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