The Loss of My Life

Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe

There are people who lose a father
only once.

I have been losing mine
in small, unremarkable increments
for as long as I have known
what it means to be a daughter.

First, the faith that love was fair.
Then, the certainty of being chosen.
Then, the childish conviction
that if I could make myself
good enough,
clever enough,
small enough to fit
inside the narrow architecture
of his affection,
he might finally turn
and see me standing there.

I spent years
mistaking the sound of a closing door
for an invitation
to knock more gently.

And still,
there was love.

God, there was love.

It lived in the strangest places.

In the white fur of a polar bear
placed into two-year-old hands,
a small, impossible creature
that would follow me
through forty winters
and sleep beside me
long after I had stopped believing
that love could keep us warm.

It lived in afternoons
that asked nothing of us,
in laughter that arrived
without permission,
in the rare and radiant hours
when being his daughter
did not feel like something
I had to earn.

Those are the memories
that make grief so merciless.

If he had only been cold,
I could have buried him
beneath the certainty
of what he was.

If he had only been kind,
I could have mourned him
without having to mourn
the years I spent
begging kindness to stay.

But he was both.

And I have spent my life
standing between those truths,
holding one in either hand,
unable to set either down
without feeling
I have betrayed the other.

They will say
he was the love of their life.

And perhaps he was.

Perhaps somewhere
he was the sun
around which another heart
built all its seasons.

But he was the loss of mine.

Not because I loved him most.
Not because my grief
is greater than anyone else's.

But because I lost him
while he was still here.

Because there is a particular sorrow
in loving someone
whose love you cannot reach
without cutting yourself
on all the things
they refuse to see.

Because I knew the weight
of his absence
long before I knew
the date of his death.

And because now
there will never be
another chance.

No ordinary Tuesday
on which he might have called
and said the words
I had finally taught myself
to stop waiting for.

No sudden tenderness
to make sense of the years.

No old man,
softened by the mercy of time,
looking at the woman
his little girl became
and saying,

I see you.

I see what happened.

I wish I had loved you better.

Death has taken
even the possibility
of those words.

And I am ashamed
of how much that hurts.

Not because I expected them.
Not because I believed
they were coming.

But because hope
is a stubborn, foolish animal
that will go on breathing
long after the door
has been nailed shut.

I have tried
to make a home
for all the things
he never gave me.

I have furnished it
with understanding,
hung forgiveness
like a coat I am not yet ready
to wear,
and opened every window
to let the bitterness out.

But grief comes in
through the floorboards.

It finds the rooms
I thought I had emptied.

It sits beside the little girl
who is still waiting
to be somebody's favourite,
and tells her gently
that the waiting is over.

I don't know
how to explain to her
that this is not
the same thing
as being free.

Because somewhere
inside the man
who could not love me
the way I needed,
there was also the man
who loved me
in the ways he knew.

And I am grateful.

I am furious.

I am grateful again.

I remember his laughter
and want to forgive him.

I remember his silence
and want to ask him why.

I remember the good
and feel the terrible tenderness
of having been loved.

I remember the hurt
and feel the terrible loneliness
of having been his child.

There is no graceful way
to carry both.

No beautiful arrangement
of words
that can make a wound
into a window
without admitting
how much of the wall
was broken.

And perhaps
that is what love becomes
when it is left unfinished.

Not a monument.
Not a lesson.
Not a tidy little story
about finding peace.

But a house
with two lights burning:

one for everything
that was beautiful,

and one for everything
that should have been.

I will keep them both.

I will not extinguish
the tenderness
to prove the hurt was real.

I will not bury
the hurt
to make the tenderness
easier to remember.

And if there is somewhere
beyond all this
where the living
can no longer disappoint
the dead,
I hope he has found it.

I hope he is warm.

I hope the weight
of being human
has finally slipped
from his shoulders.

I hope he knows
that somewhere in this world
there is a woman
who has spent her life
learning how to live
without the father
she still wishes
she could call.

And I hope,
if there is anything left
of the love
he never learned
to give me properly,
it finds its way
across whatever distance
death has made of us.

Not to mend the past.

Not to ask me
to forget.

Only to say
that somewhere,
beneath the wreckage
of everything
we could not be,

I was his daughter.

He was my father.

And I loved him.

I loved him
through the leaving,
through the silence,
through the years
when loving him
was something
I had to do
from far away.

Others may remember him
as the love of their life.

But I will remember him
as the loss of mine.

The first loss.
The longest loss.
The one I learned
to live around.

And now,
at last,
the one
I can never
get back.

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