Parents. We literally wouldn’t be here without them. And without diving too deeply into the multiple complexities that can exist across the universal lived experience of being a child, I do want to preface that I am not a licensed mental health counsellor. Any hard-earned musings, potential wisdom and personal realities stated below were born out of countless therapy sessions, endless coffee shop days, tear-streaming car rides and ignored phone calls.
16 years ago, I lost my mother to breast cancer. April holds her death date and her birthday. Then May always seems to be right there to tag Mother’s Day in.
But for the first time in a long time, I don’t want to talk about my mother. I don’t want to build a gravesite for her in a document or on this webpage. Instead, I want to introduce you to the man my brother and I call dad.
He is a by your bootstraps type of man. He was raised by five older sisters. He is a walk to school, barefoot, both ways, in the snow. He is, “here, take my shirt,” right off the skin of his back while he walks home in the rain. He is American-made. He doesn’t speak to anyone he went to high school with: “They either got into the drugs or the gangs, despite the nuns,” he says, but only with his face, never his mouth.
My father held his breath as his first-born child, his son, seized at less than a week old.
His butcher knife mentality convinced the surgeons to operate. That same resiliency rejected the previously decreed death sentence by so many other white coats. I have an older brother solely because of our father. This man is everything I have ever wanted to be when I grew up. The only person I’ve wanted to make proud.
This man is the embodiment of a cape-bearing hero and the best person you’ll ever meet. I’m biased. But I’m also not wrong. He is the man who walked me into middle school every single day for my entire first year because I asked him to. When I refused to use a booster seat for Broadway shows because I was, “a big girl now,” he bought the seat directly in front of mine without telling me, just so I could have a guaranteed unobstructed view.
You hold more hope in the world after speaking with him for just 10 minutes. He’ll leave you with a handshake, you’ll feel all through tomorrow and you’ll trust that the world’s problems aren’t as insurmountable as you once thought. Not with men like Michael tackling them from both ends.
In Taylor’s 30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30 piece in Elle—which this entire series is largely inspired by—her seventh lesson is her biggest fear. And while our fears look similar, they are in fact wildly different. Hers is deeply rooted in mass shootings, stalkers and break-ins, whereas mine looks solely like the day that I am forced to exist in a world that my father no longer inhabits.
When you lose a parent young, a tornado of truths enters your reality. One of the hardest to swallow, in my opinion, is that one day everyone you love to no end will die.
As a child, I believed my parents to be invincible. I knew of tragedy, but I saw it the way you see a zoo animal locked in a cage. It’s real, undeniable and present, but it doesn’t come home with you.
Then, suddenly and without consent, you find yourself in the very same cage. Viewed, what feels like not all that long ago, with the eyes of unmeaning higher-than-though confidence. Because I truly believe no one would ever visit a living thing in a cage if they ever believed they’d wind up there themselves.
I believe I stopped being a kid the day I realized my mother’s death was the beginning, not the ending. It was like a gunshot indicating the start of a race. Regardless of my pace, I’m going to watch those I love cross finish lines I cannot rescue them from.
I stopped being a kid with wide eyes and effortless light. The magic had ceased to exist, and life became all about waiting for that other shoe to drop. For my next worst fear to become my new reality.
I catch myself in the grocery store, knowing one day I won’t have a chef to call. I’ll be in the shower replaying all our petty fights, hitting the tiled walls with my ruthless verbal comebacks, only to break down in tears at the idea that I could ever be anything other than wildly grateful to have this man in my corner, cheering me on.
It’s not as though I live in a perpetual state of fear. It’s more like a buzz in the background. I can scrounge up days in a row where I block it out. Fill my ears with other sounds. But then there are the quiet moments. The ones I can never seem to escape. That’s when it all creeps back in.
If you were hoping for a culmination of brilliant lessons to bring this fear to a place of ease, sorry to disappoint you. I’ve got nothing. Unless the scientists learn how to fully upload our personalities into computers, we’re all still looking down the same road of undeniable mortality.
If you are no stranger to this glass cage, welcome. It’s the shittiest club that no one ever asked to be in. But the only thing that could make it worse is if we were totally alone. And we’re not.
I have to believe that many of us are holding our breaths. We’re looking at our buzzing phones, hoping it’s not that damn second shoe beginning to lose its battle with gravity. That it’s not today. It’s not yet. No, this moment is a grocery store phone call. It’s a Netflix password request or a killing time chat. It’s a perfectly mundane image and the best gift we can find while pacing around the cage we cannot ever deny.
Find more self-improvement articles here >
Written by Tori Muzyk
Illustrated by Francesca Mariama
