I lost my father this past month.

I always thought that was a funny way of putting it, “I lost…” But it’s really the best way of expressing the suddenness with which a loved one can leave when they pass away. One moment he was here, and then… gone. No more phone calls at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings, no golf in the summer, lazy conversations about the weather, politics, money, taxes, the price of gas. No advice. No more wondering how much longer he can hold on.

It wasn’t until I was back in New York, after the eulogy, the obituary, packing up his belongings, that I realized how much was missing from my life now that he is gone. And with each passing day, I realize even more. You would think that the passing of time would make death easier to accept. Things change, people come and go… and yet it actually only seems to me that the more time passes, the more his presence, or rather his absence, is felt. He grows, at least his memory does, and it gets bigger somehow. Every day that I think about him, I feel even more that vacuum left behind. And as that space expands, there’s nothing to fill it. It’s just an empty hole. And where there is emptiness, there is loss. In that space, something used to be, to exist. And now… nothing.

He is missing.

He is lost… to me, anyhow. For now.

And one day maybe I will find him again. I certainly hope so.

Until then, I like to think that while he is lost to me, I am not lost to him.

I am here.

He knows where to find me, and I hope that he sees how much I miss him.

And dad, I am doing my best to make you proud. As proud as you made me.