This Time Three Years Ago, I Lost My Father.

I remember around this time, three years back, I asked myself

how is it possible for the world to revolve without my father in it?

How can people carry on, as if nothing important had happened?

I stared at the window pane that bore witness to the times my father visited would share how his day went, and how it stood witness to me now, barely keeping myself together.

I remember deciding whether I should call in sick. But in law school, calling in sick was risking a 5.0 on your recitation. Professors didn't care if your parents died. They only cared that you were in class and that you had come prepared.

I begrudgingly stood up, yanked the towel from the hanger, and then went to the bathroom with only 45 minutes to spare. I should be heading out the door in 30 minutes. 

How was it possible for people around me to continue what they were doing while the only person I could come home to was gone?

There were moments when I would shift between thinking
No one could ever replace him.

And that thought was both comforting and shattering. 

No one, no matter how great they were, could ever take the place of my father. But with him gone, there was no one else I could sit in silence with, and whose sole presence I would draw strength from. 

It was heartbreaking.

I don't know how I was able to move past the grief. I still catch myself, eyes welling up, my throat choking back a pained lump, crippled that I will never see him again. 

It helps that the success of becoming a lawyer has helped mask the pain, as if my attention was thwarted to a bright future. But grief is like a muddied stain on a shirt. You could submerge it in the pools of success and hope that with a little time, that water will undo all the clumps. You won't see the stain inside the volume of water. But there will be no cleansing that stain, unless you readily face it, and launder yourself of the guilt - the what ifs, the have-nots, and the pain of not having been all that you are now, at a time you could have celebrated it with your loved one. 

But at least now, after three years, I can sincerely say that it was better he had become my dad and that I had gone through this grief, than to have never felt this much grief after a loss.

I loved my father. I still do. And there won't be a day that my admiration for him will fade. 

May you find comfort in the idea that no one can replace a loved one.