On love and loss and my dad

Almost three weeks ago, on Aug. 2, my dad passed away suddenly from a heart attack. He was only 62. It feels as though my foundation has been wiped out from under me.
My dad, Brad Morley, had an elite sense of humor and saw life as a series of hilarious events. He told the best stories of his childhood growing up in Stockton, California, with four brothers and two sisters. One of the last times we were all together, he regaled us with a tale of how he and his friends built a fort with a working fireplace in the middle of a very dry, very flammable field. (Thankfully, no wildfires ensued.) He loved making his grandkids laugh, and loved letting them make him laugh with their made-up, punchline-free jokes.
My dad made every situation more fun. When I was about 10 years old, deep in my American Girl doll obsession, he took me and a couple of friends to an American Girl tea party. He was the only man there. During a fiddle performance, which was part of the much-too-long program, my dad started clapping along. I was mortified and motioned for him to stop, which made him clap more enthusiastically and even whistle. I wanted to crawl under the table. But soon, the rest of the room was clapping and smiling and not on the verge of bored tears as everyone had been moments prior.
My dad loved going places and doing things with the people he loved. My fondest memories are of the road trips we took around the state, eating spray cheese on crackers and playing word games until we reached our destination. The last conversation I had with him — just two days before he died — was a quick call about what my daughters would like to eat on the camping trip he was about to take them on.
He took me to New York City for my 15th birthday. He was going for a trade show and let me tag along, which must have been a real pain. But despite him working half the time, he managed to fit in the kinds of things a 15 year old in the early 2000s wanted to do in New York. We talked to Al Roker on air on the “Today” show outside Rockefeller Center. We ate cheesecake in Times Square every day. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. We saw “The Lion King” on Broadway. On our last night, he took me to a solo violinist performance in a basement venue in SoHo. Violin was my whole life at the time. Somehow, before smartphones and pervasive internet, he had found a violin performance in a tiny venue because he wanted to encourage my passion.
Like all good fathers, my dad was an unconditional supporter. He read everything I ever wrote, even when it wasn’t very good. At his viewing, I learned he would send my articles to acquaintances at random. Which is both the most embarrassing and most touching thing I’ve ever heard. He made not just me, but everyone he knew, better by helping them see the best things he saw in them. I don’t know what I’m going to do — or who I’m going to be — without him.
Losing a parent is something I had conceptualized, as I think all adult children do. But I could never have anticipated how jarring it would be when one of the two people who have been in my life the longest was suddenly ripped away decades before their death felt within the realm of expectation.
In the three weeks since he died, I’ve bounced around the stages of grief, in what I assume is a fairly predictable pattern.
When my sister called with the news, on a Friday morning when I was out for a run, all I could say was “What? What? What do you mean?” My brain couldn’t process reality. If I’m being honest, I’m still not sure it has, or ever will. There’s a good deal of denial because I just can’t comprehend how someone who felt eternal could be here one minute and then just gone the next. I’ll see the same model of Ford truck that he drove out on the road and my heart will skip a beat because some part of me still believes he’s just gone for a while and will be coming back.
In other moments, I’m angry. Because other people survive heart attacks and live for decades longer, so why couldn’t he? The best part of my parents’ lives were just getting started, and my mom has lost the person with whom she had so many future adventures planned. I’m angry that he’s not going to be at my kids’ graduations or weddings. I know this anger is not uncommon among those who lose a loved one early or unexpectedly, but when it’s your loved one, it feels singular.
And then when I’m not angry, waves of depression will hit without warning. I’ll remember that I never got the chance to say goodbye or, maybe more importantly, thank you. In the first week after he passed, I cried in a tire repair shop, a hair salon and a Target, I’m sure traumatizing a good number of strangers.
But it’s the acceptance stage of grief that’s been hardest of all. Planning his funeral felt like organizing a very sad wedding on a five-day timeline. It was terrible and stressful and full of tears. But all that work was also distracting enough to keep us from falling to the deepest depths of despair.
In the time since, as we’ve tried returning to our normal lives, the reality of his loss is starting to sink in, as others warned me it would. On Monday, my kids went back to school, and my dad didn’t call to ask how their first day had gone as he had every other year. He hasn’t sent any of the memes he’d always text me in the middle of the day when he had downtime at his office. He hasn’t been in his backyard on Sunday afternoons, watching over the grill or sipping a cold Diet Coke.
And it hurts. But what has surprised me most about the grieving process is how much I want to talk about that hurt. I want to tell everyone that it feels like somebody reached in and hollowed out my insides. Because I think that’s the only way to explain how much my dad meant to me.
The days where I feel OK are the days I’m the most panicked, because I don’t want to forget his impact, not just on me, but on everyone who knew him. And if I’m not hurting, I’m not remembering.
I want to remember everything. Like how he handed my newborn first baby a velvet pink bunny with a rattle and a ribbon he and my mom had brought with them and how his face lit up when that baby looked at him. I want to remember the time we spent on the Provo Canyon trail training for our first marathon together, talking about every aspect of our lives and making future plans. I want to remember the way the energy in a room shifted when he walked in, and how he made everyone feel at ease. I want to remember every single person we’ve heard from since his passing who have expressed all the ways my dad was there for them, and how unconditionally he loved.
I know there’s no shortage of hurt in the future as my family and I experience holidays, birthdays and anniversaries without him for the first time, and that what were once happy occasions are going to feel sad. And I do eventually want that hurt to fade, just so life feels more livable again. But I never want to forget the kind of dad he was, or how lucky I was to have him for as long as I did.