Nine Years

How do you measure...

The concept of “nine years” doesn’t seem to be the right way to measure time since my dad died.

There’s that phrase, “seems like only yesterday,” that we use when the passage of discrete time seems discordant with how our brains and bodies remember.

But it doesn’t feel like yesterday—the pain is there, but looks different; the grief is there, but looks different. 

My body usually keeps the time for me, and I’ll remember sometime in January that there’s a reason I’m especially fatigued, unfocused, emotional. But this year, having been gone from home for the entire month of January, I didn’t have the normal reaction. So even that is different this year.

Ironically, this discrete unit of time feels too amorphous, too undefined, too vague for what it’s trying to measure. My culture doesn’t seem to have the right understanding of time for things like this—things that don’t fit into a container or that surpass language.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Not even 3,285 (well, 3,286 as of today) days seems to work. Like, what does that even mean?

Unless it’s 3,285 potential sunsets my mom has watched without him. Somehow that seems more profound.

I haven’t thought to count the number of times I’ve listened to Simon & Garfunkel specifically to conjure him into the room. Or played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on the piano and remembering my mom saying she wanted me to play it on their 50^th wedding anniversary, which came and went in 2019.

Or the number of times I’ve seen someone running with, shall we say, unique form, and thinking of the moments we’d both be in the car together, silently watch a person run by, and synchronously make the same comment about how far they were leaning back or how much they were flailing their arms.

Or the number of times I’ve thought about the last text exchange we’d had, on 1/31/2015, which was him giving me the brand of travel coffee mug (Zojirushi), which I then bought, and it arrived after he died. I still it, and even though it’s lost some of its insulating power, I don’t think I can ever get rid of it. I know these dates because I still have the text thread in my phone.

Or the number of times I’ve thought about if he’d understand my career choice to not want to manage a team, since he was so good at it.

Or the number of times I’ve wished I knew more about his inner workings, had more insight into him as an adult.

Or the number of times I thought it important to live my life in honor of him, before I remembered that living my life in honor of myself would be what he’d have wanted.

Or the number of times I’ve seen a yellow swallowtail butterfly, like the kind that was dancing above our heads as we released his ashes into a mountain stream, and said, “Hi, Dad.”