Sitting in here makes it too real that I’ll never physically hear him speak again. The house triggers all sorts of memories and realizations like that.
I’m imagining the way he used to call for me from the kitchen. He never really yelled, his voice was kind of soft. He would say the first syllable of my name, asking what I wanted to do for dinner or if I was ready to head out.
Months after he died I bought his house to either work through my problems to a better end or torture myself in some horrible way I must deserve. I’ve felt both ways depending on the day. I guess it’s a form of exposure therapy.
As we transform the house to update it and make it our own, I feel my dad’s loss in new ways. It’s not because I’m rearranging or redesigning it, he never cared about things like that. It feels more like I’m erasing his DNA from it.
By sorting out the end of his life after he passed, we’ve had to do so much guessing about what he would have wanted. It has brought me to bigger questions about him and how he made me who I am. As we work on the house, I lose more of someone I never understood in the first place. The mystery grows and what familiarity I had dissolves over time, gets sanded, painted over, thrown out or cleaned.
On a good day, I know we’re bringing the house to it’s full potential and giving it new life, along with my own memories of it and of him. We’re continuing the story in a constructively optimistic way.
While under construction, the house’s status symbolizes my state of mind. The transformation of the walls, colors and smells does help me shift to the positive. It will take practice to think more in this direction as I unpack the 10 years I visited every-other weekend and one day a week, plus dealing with his unexpected death and sorting through what is left of his life.
I need patience with myself to understand what we took on by moving in. None of this is how I wanted it – the first year as an engaged couple, our first home together, the first time we picked paint colors or tiles. Avoiding discussing our future until we can bury the past that this house has dug up.
I blame the house for my problems because it is tactile, concrete and can’t talk back. Things aren’t black and white enough to blame my dad or anyone else involved. I feel guilty for being judgmental when I do that anyway. And I’m always blaming myself in the background because, well, I always have.
Today isn’t one of the good days. We work through the new normal, pretending we have control over our lives through our choices. I try to rationalize that I need to practice gratefulness instead of placing blame. But my emotional heart beats louder than my logical brain can explain.
…And really, all I can think about is how his heart stopped before any of us knew it.