This means he has been dead for approximately four and a half years.
It never gets easier. It never gets more believable. I still miss my dad. I still want to talk to him — as a grown adult, I won’t say every day, but every couple of days. Even now, even four years later. There is not a work week or a weekend that goes by where I don’t want to call up my dad and tell him something, even if it’s just a sentence or two. He would not mind the five minute phone call.
I have done my part, I think, of a daughter grieving her father. Though his death came too soon, it is likely expected that children should outlive their parents. That they should themselves assume the role of active adults — even if it is a role they share, like I with my mother, of surviving spouses. This new role is one I can assume — have assumed — can accept as a new normal.
But I still miss him for him.
There are times I want to talk to my dad, not to get his fatherly advice or wisdom, but just to share. To hear his reaction over something we’d find mutually funny or frustrating — or both. To talk about our dogs. To share a song or a witty one-liner heard on the radio. To hear him rant or rage.
To hear him laugh.
I would give anything to hear my father laugh again.