I Want to Be There

I have been thinking a lot about my father lately.

Not about his death exactly. He died of liver cancer on January 10, 2020, at 59 years old. I have had years to think about that day and everything surrounding it. Lately, I have been thinking about everything that happened afterward.

My father was my best friend. That is easy to say about someone after they die, when memory has had time to soften edges and grief has a way of turning people into idealized versions of themselves. But I don't mean it that way. I mean he was actually my best friend.

When I was little, his belly was where I crawled up to take a nap. In fourth grade, I had to write an essay about my hero. I wrote about him. Later, he was my baseball coach and the person I most wanted to make proud. As I got older, the relationship changed, but the closeness didn't.

My father started driving a semi when I was about twelve years old. During summer breaks in middle school, I would pack a bag and spend close to a month traveling the country beside him. Over the years, we made it through all 48 contiguous states. We slept in the truck, ate at truck stops, listened to each other's music, stopped at amusement parks when we came across them, and mostly just talked. Somehow, we could spend weeks living in the cab of a semi without getting tired of each other. I don't remember wanting to be anywhere but there, or with anyone but him.

As I got older, there were motorcycles and pool halls. I had been riding on the back of his motorcycles since I was little; eventually, I was riding my own Harley beside him to places like Daytona Beach and Sturgis. As a teenager, I routinely spent seven hours across a pool table from him, drinking Cokes with grenadine and cherries until the place closed at one in the morning. The activity almost didn't matter. We just genuinely liked being together.

And we talked. About relationships, choices, people, meaning, whatever was happening in our lives, and all the existential shit I still spend far too much time thinking about. Toward the end of his life, something in those conversations began to change. I wasn't only getting to know him as my father anymore. I was beginning to know him as another man.

He was the person I wanted to call when something went right and the person I wanted when something went wrong. Somehow my accomplishments felt a little better after I shared them with him, and my failures felt a little less devastating after we talked. He was the person I wanted beside me while my life was happening.

And then, suddenly, he wasn't.

I was 33 when my father died. Old enough that I had already built a life of my own, but young enough that so much of the life I have now hadn't happened yet.

He met the woman I would eventually marry, something for which I will always be grateful. At the time, I was only beginning to understand what our relationship would become. He saw the beginning. He never saw us. He never saw me marry her. He never saw the life we built together. He never saw me become a husband or a father. He never met my daughters.

My father died once. His absence has happened thousands of times since.

I don't think I understood that part of his death when it happened. A person doesn't disappear only from the moment in which they die. They disappear from every moment that comes afterward.

He isn't here when something happens and my first instinct is still to tell him. And now that I am a father myself, there are questions I didn't know enough to ask him while he was alive. There are things I understand about him now that I couldn't have understood then.

I got the chance near the end of his life to begin knowing my father as another man. I never got the chance to know him as another father. His death didn't only take him out of his future. It took him out of mine.

I found myself thinking about all of this toward the end of ten days in Europe.

It had been an incredible trip. I ate whatever I wanted. I drank whatever I wanted. I didn't particularly care what time it was, what the nutritional information said, or whether something fit into the way I normally try to take care of myself. It was vacation, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

But sometime during those last few days, my thoughts started shifting toward home. Toward my daughters. Toward getting back to my life. I started thinking about exercising again, eating the way I normally eat, sleeping in my own bed, and returning to all the routines I had happily ignored for ten days.

Coming home from a vacation like that would normally mean wanting to undo some of the damage. Lose whatever weight I gained. Feel better. Get back into shape. This time, though, I found myself thinking about something much larger.

I started thinking about everything my father has missed. Then I started thinking about everything I don't want to miss.

My daughters are one and three. Right now, so much of fatherhood is immediate. Diapers. Meals. Bedtime. Playing on the floor. Fixing whatever object is apparently essential to life at that particular moment. Helping them learn things that will eventually become so automatic none of us will remember when they couldn't do them.

It is easy, when your children are this young, to experience parenthood almost entirely in the present. Their needs are immediate because everything about them is immediate. But their lives extend so far beyond the childhood I am experiencing with them now.

There are entire versions of my daughters I haven't met yet. I want to meet them.

I want to know who they are at five and eight and twelve. I want to meet the teenagers who will probably challenge me in ways I cannot yet imagine. I want to watch them become increasingly independent and discover who they are when more and more of their lives belong to them.

I want to see what they become good at. I want to know what they care about. I want to see which dreams disappear and which ones survive. I want to watch their interests become passions or see which ones they leave behind. I want to see them become versions of themselves none of us could have predicted when they were one and three.

I want to see them graduate from high school. I want to sit somewhere in an audience and hear each of their names called at a college graduation, if that's what they choose. Graduate school. Medical school. Trade school. Whatever paths they choose.

I want to meet the people they fall in love with. If they choose to get married, I want to be there. If they want me to walk them down the aisle, I want to make that walk. If they choose to have children, I want to hear the news. And someday, if I am fortunate enough, I want one of my daughters to place her baby in my arms.

But it isn't only the milestones I want. In some ways, those are the easiest moments to imagine because we know what they are supposed to look like. Graduations. Weddings. Babies. Birthdays. Christmases. The photographs that eventually become evidence that we were there.

What I want even more are all the things I don't know enough to imagine yet.

I want my daughters to be able to call me when they are grown and something has gone terribly wrong. I want to be the person who can tell them they are going to be okay and have them believe me. I want them to call when something has gone wonderfully right because telling Dad somehow makes it a little better.

I want to know when they're questioning a decision they've made, when someone breaks their hearts, when they get an opportunity they thought would never come, or when they just need someone who has known them their entire lives to remind them who they are.

I want to sit across from the women they become and discover that, after all those years, we still haven't run out of things to talk about.

Maybe I want those conversations so badly because I know what it is to lose them. When my father died at 59, I didn't only lose the father I had known for 33 years. I lost every conversation we would have had afterward. Every question I hadn't thought to ask. Every version of myself I would have wanted him to know.

There is a kind of arrogance in the way most of us think about the future. We make plans years in advance. We save for retirement. We imagine weddings and grandchildren and the people we will be decades from now. We speak about those things as though time is something waiting for us rather than something we are fortunate to receive.

We have to go about life this way. Life would be nearly impossible if we woke up every morning consumed by the possibility that we might not get any of it. But none of it is promised.

Taking care of myself cannot guarantee that I will walk my daughters down an aisle or hold their children. I can exercise regularly, eat well, get enough sleep, go to the doctor, and do everything else I am supposed to do, and none of it can guarantee me more time.

Health is not a contract with the future.

There is no workout routine that can promise me another Christmas. No diet can guarantee that I will meet my grandchildren. There is no number on a scale that tells me how many conversations I have left with my daughters.

But uncertainty is not the same thing as helplessness. There are things about how long I will live that I cannot control. There are also things I can influence. And lately, I have been thinking differently about what those choices mean.

It is easy to make health about appearance. The number on the scale. The weight on the bar. How your clothes fit. What you see when you look in the mirror. Those things can motivate me. I'm not going to pretend they don't. But they seem very small now compared with what I actually want.

I don't just want more years in my life. I want more years in theirs.

That distinction has changed something for me.

Exercise feels different when I think of it as trying to increase the odds that I am sitting somewhere in an audience twenty years from now. Eating well feels different when the thing I am protecting isn't how my body looks but the possibility of still being there to answer their calls decades from now. Going to the doctor, sleeping enough, paying attention to my health—none of it feels quite as trivial when I remember what I am actually asking my body to do.

I am asking it to carry me as far into their lives as it reasonably can.

I want another Christmas. Another birthday. Another phone call. Another graduation. Another ordinary Tuesday when one of my daughters needs to tell me something that could have waited but didn't because she wanted her dad to know. I want the privilege of becoming old enough that my daughters know me as an old man.

So I came home from Europe, and it was time to get back to it.

Not because ten days of eating and drinking whatever I wanted requires punishment. It doesn't. I had a wonderful time, and I would do it again. And not because I have suddenly convinced myself that enough discipline can protect me from death. It can't.

I'm getting back to it because the life waiting for me at home reminded me what I am training for.

There will still be vacations. There will still be dessert. There will still be nights when I don't get enough sleep and mornings when I don't particularly want to work out. I am not interested in spending whatever life I have obsessively trying to extend it. That would miss the point.

I want to live it. I want to give myself every reasonable chance to live as much of it with my daughters as I can.

The people we love keep living after we die. Their stories keep moving. They become people we never know. They have experiences we never see. They encounter moments when they would have called us, needed us, celebrated with us, or simply wanted us sitting beside them.

I know because I have been the person who kept living. I have gotten married. I have become a father. I have built a career, taken chances, succeeded at things, and failed at others. I have become someone my father never got the chance to know.

Through all of it, I have carried pieces of him with me. I hear him in some of the ways I think. I find him in things I still love. I know that parts of who I am were shaped in a semi cab somewhere between one state and another, across a pool table at one in the morning, or riding a motorcycle beside him.

I am grateful for what remains. But carrying pieces of someone is not the same as having them here. I would still rather be able to call my dad.

Someday, my daughters will carry pieces of me too. That is already happening. I can already see pieces of myself in them, and I know there will be more that neither they nor I recognize until years from now. But I don't want those pieces to have to stand in for me any sooner than they have to.

I cannot promise my daughters that I will be there for everything. No parent can. I cannot guarantee the graduations, weddings, grandchildren, phone calls, ordinary Tuesdays, or any of the other moments I want. All I can do is take seriously the parts that are mine to influence and then live the life I am trying so hard to preserve.

There are versions of my daughters they have yet to become, and I want to know them. There are conversations we haven't had, and I want to have them. There are moments in their lives that none of us can see coming.

I want to be there.