oh, daddy : thirty-two years ago today.

Daddy grave2 One Year

When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name
and dates, down into the oval track of the
first name’s O, middle name’s O,
the short O of his last name,
and down into the hyphen between
his birth and death–little trough of his life.
Soft bugs appeared on my shoes,
like grains of pollen, I let them move on me,
I rinsed a dark fleck of mica,
and down inside the engraved letters
the first dots of lichen were appearing
like stars in early evening.
I saw the speedwell on the ground with its horns,
the coiled ferns, copper-beech blossoms, each
petal like that disc of matter which
swayed, on the last day, on his tongue.
Tamarack, Western hemlock,
manzanita, water birch
with its scored bark,
I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,
then I lay down on my father’s grave.
The sun shone down on me, the powerful
ants walked on me. When I woke,
my cheek was crumbly, yellowish
with a mustard plaster of earth. Only
at the last minute did I think of his body
actually under me, the can of
bone, ash, soft as a goosedown
pillow that bursts in bed with the lovers.
When I kissed his stone it was not enough,
when I licked it my tongue went dry a moment, I
ate his dust, I tasted my dirt host.

-Sharon Olds

One year seems incomprehensible. And then two. In his absence, I lived in Munich, finished college. Then four years. Graduate school, a marriage, a job. Then eight, ten, fifteen. Trips around the world, work. A divorce. A marriage. A child. Eighteen years, then twenty. Twenty-five. Unthinkable. Another child. Deaths and disappointments, great chest lifting joys, a book and then two then three and now seven. And you, my dear sweet father, you missed it all. All except the birth, the skinned knees, the piano lessons, the sledding down steep wild hills, the sits in your lap, Sunday afternoon football, the obsession with Johnny Unitas, the blackberry picking and cobblers, the whistles at suppertime to call me in from the creek, the Sunday School, the Big Church, the Hillcrest Elementary School, the dropping everything to pick me up, the dances on your black wingtip shoes, the junior high angst, the high school marching band, the friends, the sleepovers, the midnight frenzied drives to the emergency room, you clutching your chest, you human rivet the loss around which my life has spun, the strong point that has held it together, even in your absence.

Thirty-two years. One year. The same.

What were you doing thirty-two years ago today? Do you know?

My friend Elina Rodriguez posted something on Facebook two years ago that stopped me. I had heard parts of her moving story of coming to the U.S. before, but I didn’t understand that as she experienced her treacherous journey to the U.S., I was in a hospital intensive care waiting room as my father lay dying. Elina wrote: “Thirty years ago today, at 2am, I left my home in Havana, Cuba. Hope and Faith sustained me during the longest 3 days of my life, journeying from Mariel harbor to the land of some unknown thing called ‘freedom’.”

Daddy would die on the second day of Elina’s trip; I was struck by the parallels of the journeys, so different and yet shared. Elina wrote back: “Patti, thirty years ago tomorrow, I was in an overcrowded lobster fishing boat, with 120 other people including my 2-year-old son, “refuged” from a storm in a harbor controlled by authorities that had banned us as ‘traitors’, hungry, thirsty, not able to go back and not able to go forward, unable to touch land anywhere–Striking that we were both journeying; he to a place of peace. My love is with you.”

We are all on a shared journey.

I miss Daddy. Can you tell? It was his heart that gave out. My job, all these years later, is to make sure that you know who he was. Melvin Lonnie Digh. We keep people alive by telling their stories.

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

Please, please listen to these nine minutes and forty-five seconds, and pass it along to others who will also listen (from the audiobook version of Life is a Verb). The end of the recording may give you some idea of my loss, all these years later:

Click here to listen to Live An Irresistible Obituary 5-11-2010

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

4 comments to " oh, daddy : thirty-two years ago today. "
  • Oh, God. This is so beautiful. For me, 13 years at the beginning of June. For a dear friend, it will be four years later this month. This post helped me more than you know (I am working on a series of poems that I have been fighting writing, though they have not been fighting me). There is a poem by the lovely Li-Young Lee called “Visions and Interpretations” that I wish I could wrap up and give you as a give. It’s in his book “Rose.” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/visions-and-interpretations/

  • Agpenson

    thank you for sharing
    <3  I lost my daddy  in 1987 .. a sudden death.. an  accident … I MISS YOU daddy <3  i too MISS him …yes, Death only ENDS a life..; NOT a relationship ! <3

  • Thanks for these beautiful words. I hope my children will have the same sort of grounding you describe from the stories I tell them about their father. It breaks my heart that they will miss so many of those memories that I was so fortunate to share with my own father (“dances on your black wingtip shoes” really got me), even though they are collecting a different brand of memories with the uncles and godfathers who try to fill the void for important events. Thanks for the reminder that “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” 
    Still, it was hard to go through another 1st Communion yesterday without his physical presence. Sometimes the children, still age-appropriately self-involved, seem oblivious to the loss. Yesterday, though, it was  quietly seen in the way 2 little girls each grasped a locket containing his picture that hangs close to each of their hearts, and a little boy stooped down to kiss his father’s name on the stone when we visited the cemetery to “show Daddy how his little girl looked in her 1st Communion dress.” Powerful day, May 12th. 

  • Tina Gardner

    May 12, 1980. I kept a journal back then–but my journals are in storage. What was I doing? I Graduated from high school nine-days later. I imagine I was taking finals. Maybe it was Senior Slough Day? In March 1980 my dad changed jobs. We moved to Roy, Utah. My dad became the Systems Analysis Manager Over the Avionics Software on the F-16–a huge government title. I had a choice–move to Utah 9-weeks before school got out there or stay with friends until graduation in June. I was bored and school got out 3-weeks sooner in Utah. I made the move. It was like being a foreign exchange student. I was the stylish girl from a very liberal school in Southern California, suddenly at a small, very conservative high school. My first week at Roy High I saw a sign  saying, “Stomp on Friday.”  Huh? A stomp was a dance.  One day that week, a teacher said, “Every boy wearing a tie, please, stand for extra credit.” Fridays were Royal Pride Day and the students were encouraged to dress up–ties for boys, dresses for girls. The next Friday I wore a tie to school–but the teacher wouldn’t give me extra credit, because girls needed to wear a dress. For the rest of the school year, I dressed punk and made a huge effort not to fit in. Seniors didn’t go to the Junior Prom, they went to the Cotillion at the State Capitol. And Senior Slough Day? That was the day all the Seniors ditched school to go to a planned picnic at the park.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *