Losing My Dad: A Coming-Of-Age Story

When I was eighteen, I was living a happy-go-lucky lifestyle. I was months away from starting my first year of college away from home, I had an internship, and I was early into my first serious relationship. Life felt full of fun and possibility. I remember strolling the streets outside my office at lunchtime, listening to my iPod, feeling like I was in a movie montage. Even my relationship with my parents had improved, particularly with my dad. "You’re just meant for college, Emily," he’d always said to me growing up when I’d come home espousing teenage woes. He was the kind of dad who seemed like he was more suited to grown children—the ones he could talk with about life and politics and The Way of Things, not about feelings or fashion or emo girl music. And here I was on the cusp of that future life he’d pictured for me. Commuting to work together, the occasional lunch at one of the department store cafeterias, sipping on cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi in his office at the end of the day while I waited for a ride home. It felt like we had one foot into the adult father-daughter relationship he’d been looking forward to throughout my young life. Things were good.

Mid-summer, I had to head to school for an orientation weekend. It happened to overlap with our family’s annual lakeside reunion, so my family decided to stop there on the way and spend a few days with them prior to Chicago. The plan had been for my mom, dad, and brother to all go, but at the last minute my dad had to stay back for a work event that weekend. On an average day, before heading to swim and hang out with relatives at the lake, my mom got a phone call. It was my dad—he'd had an MRI, and they’d found something.

I continued on to the orientation weekend without them, but I don’t remember a lot of it. It was strange seeing the bubbly incoming freshmen so full of hope and excitement—how I’d been 24 hours prior—and feeling suddenly like they were all so lucky, so unaware. I pretended outwardly like everything was fine, but every chance I got I checked my phone for any updates from my family (Was my dad going to have to go to the hospital tonight? Would he have surgery? I had no idea). That night, when I went back to the dorms I met my roommate for the night. Something about her made me feel at ease after a full day of faking it, and she became the first non-family member I told about my dad. In the coming years she would become a housemate and friend who would see me at some of the worst points of my grief, but for that night we were two almost-collegiate girls, making the most of a weird situation.

Weeks later, he had surgery and it was determined that he had Glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive type of brain cancer. The prognosis wasn't good, but I didn't really know that at the time. I was a legal adult, but I was still shielded from most of the details. "This isn’t my life," I'd constantly think. "This is the kind of thing that happens to other people."

Over the next year, my experience of my dad was in snippets. We didn't have FaceTime or unlimited texts, so interactions were limited to sporadic phone calls and visits. I think now that this was done intentionally, to shield me—to help me focus on school and the life he wanted for me—but each time I saw or heard from him, it was a window into his steady decline. He came for Parent’s Weekend in the fall and though he was in good spirits, he was slimmer and seemed tired and slow-moving. By Christmas, his memory had started to fade. I showed off my first quarter grades, and with an uncharacteristic tear in the corner of his eye, he told me he was proud. When I returned home for the summer, he'd undergone another surgery, and his health had worsened. In the late weeks of August, he was hospitalized and then transferred to a hospice facility where he lived out his final days.

I was nineteen when he died, but it felt like I'd grown up overnight. The day after his memorial service, I returned to school and continued to grieve away from home. The life I'd pictured just over a year ago felt like a distant memory and an elusive reality I'd never have. I started seeing a counselor. I threw myself into my (slightly lighter) class load. I learned deep breathing to manage my new grief emotion: anxiety. I took long naps and cried. Each day I got a little more comfortable just being not-okay, and that helped me exist in the world with a little less fear. I found support in generous friendships. One friend, despite never having endured a loss herself, would drive up to campus when she knew I was having a hard day or stay on the phone with me until I fell asleep. Another—who had lost her mom a couple of years prior—constantly assured me that my feelings were normal and commiserated about everyone constantly referring to their parents (plural).

There is a sense of relief when someone who has been battling cancer finally reaches the end. No more suffering. But it starts the clock over on the grief in a way because now—it's really over. It was a difficult year after his loss, as they say the first year will be, but managing the grief has been a life-long journey. It's not an everyday thing; as time goes on, the pain has become less frequent and less acute. I didn't think that would happen, and at first it worried me because I felt like I was losing him. But the truth is that you can never really lose them, and when I recall memories of my dad they're still vibrant, like the person he was all those years ago. This experience of loss has shaped the person I am, and I'm grateful for the life I have now. And—some days I just miss having a dad. If there's one thing I've learned in grief, it's that both of these things can be true.