Karina Itzel

I stared at the flames in the fire pit,

feeling as it grew inside me,

this realization that I would spend 

maybe my whole life trying to emulate a man I 

never really met.

I sat sandwiched between his daughters, listening to

the pride in their voice as they spoke about this stranger, this man

who woke his kids up with

tickles and kisses on their feet,

who wore his nails down to the nub

playing his guitar into the early hours of the morning,

sitting around his own campfire hundreds of miles and

three decades away,

who sang with such passion his praises became preachings piercing the heart of anybody who 

could hear him,

who drove across borders 

in the middle of the night and the work week 

because he couldn’t fathom being away from his wife while she

recovered from surgery,

who gifted his daughter snickers bars for her birthday because even when 

he couldn’t afford to buy anything else,

he also couldn’t afford not to show her how much he loved her.

And I don’t understand 

how he’s the same man from my memories,

this man who I only ever heard utter a handful of words at a time –

who I heard laugh even less. 

It feels like I might be in the wrong timeline 

except sometimes there were moments

where I caught a glimpse of this stranger,

like when he was forced to spend too many days away from his wife

and so he refused to let go of the bobby pins that she usually kept in her hair

but that he then kept safe in his pocket.

I watched his funeral on facebook live

and though it was better than nothing, it didn’t quite feel like closure.

     

  But what is closure anyway? 

When the flame of the person you love has been dimming for over a decade?

When you can’t remember who they were before the dementia started tearing away at them?

When you feel like you never even got to know them in the first place?

How do you grieve the death of a relationship that was never birthed to begin with?

Grieving then becomes a burial of would-haves.

     I wonder what it would have been like 

to hear him tell me stories of my mom bullying her brothers as a child and whether

he’d done the same,

to sit with him – guitar on my lap – as he taught me how to 

make music sound like it was

pouring directly from my heart the way he did,

to understand the kind of passion and faith and boldness that

made him love God with all his heart,

to listen to him reminiscing over the first time he met my nana,

the time he decided he was in love,

the countless times in their more than 50 years of marriage 

when he decided

again and again to keep loving her,

to know whether he would be proud of the way his daughter raised me or 

the way I’ll raise my own.

I stare at the flames in the fire pit,

feeling as it grows inside me,

this realization that I will spend 

maybe my whole life trying to emulate a man I’ll 

never meet.