“At Least You Knew It Was Coming”

I learned this morning that this essay was selected as an honorable mention in the 2022 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. It’s been so long since I submitted the piece that I’d nearly forgotten about it. They won’t be publishing the honorable mentions, so I thought I’d share it here.

At the place where we buried my dad’s ashes

My dad has been dead for 23 days. Nearly a month now. But this is not going to be an essay about grief, or maybe it is, but it’s not meant to be morose or overly melancholy. It’s merely an attempt, my attempt, to articulate what it feels like when someone you love dies after being sick for a very, very long time. I’m told that when death comes unexpectedly — when, say, an otherwise healthy 41-year-old drops dead on his doorstep from a heart attack or the phone rings in the middle of the night or the police show up on your doorstep — the surprise, in whatever form it comes, is a trauma all its own. This makes sense to me. My 11-year-old and I were hit by a drunk driver last summer. We were listening to the audio version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and I was smiling a little as we drove along the small island highway. Isn’t it strange that I remember this? I was smiling, enjoying the saturated greens of the western hemlocks, the red bark of the waving madronas, and the presence of my boy beside me, when the realization landed: in the span of maybe two seconds I understood that the…