By Megan Kiger 
“I wish Dad wasn’t dead, ” my sister said as we trudged back into the spring pollen to make small talk with family and stretch the bottom parts of our faces into almost smiles. I exhaled through my nose, the broken beginnings of a laugh, or maybe a cry, and said, “Me too.”
The funny thing is, my dad wasn’t much for family gatherings. He often stayed hidden or would sneak out for a taste of the food before disappearing again. If he was still here, I don’t know that the gatherings would be different, but I understood what she meant—they felt different, and that was enough.
The suddenness of the moment and the matter-of-fact way she spoke left me with my thoughts, lost and untethered. We didn’t—we don’t—talk about him much. I think it would be easy and cliché to say it’s too hard, but it is. It is too hard.
Five years have passed, and it’s hard not to stop my social battery from emptying when I think about him. It’s hard not to weep when I hit shuffle, and my iTunes playlist finds the song we danced to at my wedding. It’s hard to stop my throat from constricting when I tell my daughters stories about him or drive by my childhood home. All of it is hard—but it’s hard because we don’t talk about him enough.
My first Father’s Day without him, I thought I’d have to stay off the internet. I hated seeing my feed flooded with posts dedicated to dads who weren’t mine. Dads who were still here.
But with each passing year, something began to shift. I noticed many dads have the same light-wash pair of jeans from the ’90s and overused white sneakers—just like mine. Many childhood photos feature dads outdoors with voluminous hair and mustaches, tucked-in shirts, and casually cool smiles—just like mine. I find myself grieving yet happy that so many people I know still have their dads here and keep them close. There is a unique nostalgia in seeing my dad represented in others, and I’ve grown to enjoy it.
Social media messaging encourages us to be considerate of those without parents on the days we celebrate them—but I strongly and respectfully disagree. I am one of the lucky ones who still has my mom, but as someone who has been without her dad for the last five years, please take and post all the photos, say all the nice things about the men who raised you, on and offline, and don’t hold back.
For those of us without our dads, may we spend the day honoring them alongside the other fathers in our lives. May we tell the stories even—and especially—when it’s hard.
My mom shared a dream she recently had about my dad. I sat on the couch next to her, shifting uncomfortably back and forth, willing her to stop but unable to say so.
In her dream, he was sitting at the edge of her bed “looking sharp in all black.” She said he was a younger version of himself, one I hadn’t met. I often forget she knew a man I didn’t, that my dad was her husband, her life partner.
She sat up in bed and asked him if he was okay, and he nodded. As a father of three daughters, she was excited to tell him about my nephews, and that he had grandsons.
“I do?” he asked her.
“You do,” she said.
My mom and I sat in silence for a moment, our eyes welling while my daughters watched Bluey, completely unaware.
“That sounds like a good Dad dream,” I said. And I knew then—we had to do this more. We had to talk about our dreams, share the memories, cry, laugh, remember. We had to talk about Dad. Say the word “dad.”
I thought back to that scene in The Parent Trap remake where 12-year-old Lindsay Lohan is acting her little heart out. In the car ride back to their glamorous vineyard home, she says to her dad, “If you ask me, a dad is an irreplaceable person in a girl’s life. Think about it. There’s a whole day devoted to celebrating fathers. Just imagine someone’s life without a father, never being able to say ‘Hi, Dad!’ or ‘What’s up, Dad?’ or ‘Catch ya later, Dad!’”
“So let me get this straight,” he responds. “You missed being able to call me ‘Dad?’”
I am her, and she is me, when she responds, “Yeah, I really have, Dad.”
by Laura Bower 
by Her View From Home 
