Prayer For A Father

I don’t remember when I stopped praying for my father. I just know it happened long before I stopped believing in God. Back when belief still felt like leverage, I’d lie in bed and whisper his name up at the ceiling, like he might be sleeping just above it. There was a time when I would lie in my bed, like a child in a movie, and whisper his name up into the dark ceiling as if he slept on the roof above. Like it might anchor him to our home and stop him from drifting off into whatever private storm he had summoned into our lives. I prayed for him to be safe or for him to stop smoking, drinking, and whatever other vices I believed would keep him from going to Heaven. I was sure, in the way only a child could be sure, that I would be going there myself. I wanted him to be there with me when I went. Over time, my prayers changed tone, they became more desperate and a little quieter. Eventually, they were completely silent. Finally, they stopped all together.

Years later, his eventual suicide wasn’t much of a surprise. If I’m honest, I’d already grieved him long before the call came. He had been a ghost in my heart, a silhouette overlaying my veins. He was a man shaped space in the ceiling of my mind filled with tension and noise. What shocked me wasn’t that he was gone, it was how little it moved me. I stared out the front door windows for a long time after they told me, trying to conjure something: sadness, grief, disbelief…but all I felt was a hollow sort of confirmation. It was like finishing a book when you’d already guessed the ending in the earlier chapters.

It took a while for it to even affect me. Not emotionally, but practically. The logistics of death are tedious and cruel. How will I tell the kids when they’re older? How will I explain to people that I never went to the funeral? I just went through the motions. It was easy since I had no belongings of his or any interactions with the people in his life at this point. There was nothing physical for me to sort or anyone else to confront.

Now, I mostly feel anger and disappointment. Anger at the way he stayed gone throughout my teens and early adulthood. Anger that he made it all seem so inevitable, like he’d been waiting for the moment to justify how broken he already felt. I also felt disappointment in the man I had hoped he would become but never did. He was always almost someone important throughout the different points of my life. He had tried to be a better communicator with his biennial phone calls, a softer presence whenever we did speak. He had become a man with  almost more to give than just excuses. But the almost was never enough, and after a while I stopped trying to contribute to the awkward conversations. Maybe that was a failure on my part.

When people would talk about grief, I’d just nod. I let them share their versions of loss, their memories wrapped in love or regret. I rarely shared mine, because it doesn’t fit the mold. My grief is sharp, angular. It doesn’t cry easily. It waits quietly in the back of my chest, surfacing not with tears, but with questions that have no one left to answer . Sometimes I still talk to him, but never with the hope that he hears me. It’s not a prayer anymore. It’s just a sore in the back of my mouth that I keep tonguing so that it won’t heal.