Dad died when I was 27. That’s when I began to write for him.

What I wanted – or needed – to do was to write his story before it disappeared from the world. In that sense, I wrote in his stead, rather than for him as in having him as listener or reader. A poem I wrote at that time was “Song for my father,” in which I acknowledged that I wanted to vocalize his words, but I knew I could only do my own keening for his loss.

My dad was so unremarkable, so unheroic, that when Sinatra’s “My Way” was played over the audio at Dad’s funeral it was almost laughable. About the only thing my father did “his way” was his death. He literally died in his sleep, in a coma, but I’ve always believed it was suicide by stroke. The second day after he was found unconscious, I had a talk with Dad in my head. “You’ve been looking for a way out, Dad. Here’s your window. Take it.” It wasn’t what I wanted, but the doctor said the stroke left him “no quality of life” even if he continued to live. And Dad had prepared his three daughters for years – since we were children – with his expectation of an early demise. For no particular reason, he didn’t expect to live longer than his father, who died at 45. Dad paved the way with self-denial, depression, and lack of hope. He gave me a great deal of love, but his quality of life had already become very low when he managed to slip out of that open window.

So I wrote for Dad. He had actually made a few notes in the last year of so of his life, prodded by conversations with me. He even spoke to me in the notebook. What he wrote echoed his sense of uselessness and lack of direction in life. I wrote for Dad in hopes of filling in the blanks left behind. I wanted to show the value in his life, for me in particular, and in the way all individual human lives are valuable. I wanted to express how I could accept his absence because I loved him so much, and what it was about him that I loved. I remember standing next to his hospital bed after he died, whispering, “Okay, okay; it’s okay.” It felt as if he’d become my child rather than my father, and I was overcome with tenderness and the desire to reassure him that his daughters would be all right. That I would be all right.

That night I was ill. The day of the funeral my anxiety was enormous. As our car followed the gray hearse through the streets of Detroit, I sat between my sisters hardly able to breathe. At the graveside a spider navigated the green AstroTurf beside my foot. Spiders had always terrified me. I thought I could become hysterical, and then realized, “If I let myself become a basket case in my grief, it won’t honor my deep love for Dad.” I managed to pull away from the worst of it, but stayed desperate to write for my father, to try to find the meaning in his existence, to discern the real truth of his short life.

I’m still writing.