On the Death of my Father...

You know, it's a strange thing losing my dad. He and my mom are the people I've known the longest in my life. 42 years. I never "met" him; he was just always there. But along the way, I did meet him.

I met him when I was a child, when he'd hold my hand to cross the street, put me on his lap to tell me a story, and when he'd put silly gifts like squirt guns and slinkies in my Christmas stocking.

​Then when I was a teenager, I met him again. He taught me about music and how to play the guitar. He told me about his life when he was a teenager and all the wild adventures he'd been on. He shared his cigarettes with me and taught me to love whiskey. And he'd still put slinkies in my Christmas stocking because he had a silly sense of humor like that.

When I became a parent, I met him again. I realized how much he'd always loved us girls and how he'd give his life for ours in a heartbeat if it ever came to that. I learned what kind of grandfather he was, and how all that love he'd poured on his daughters for years expanded to now include all his grandkids too.

In my thirties, I met my dad again. I learned he had never been a perfect man. The idealized version of him slipped away, and I met my dad as just a man, the man he was, the imperfect man he always told me he was but that I didn't believe was possible. I met the man who drank too much and could hurt me sometimes with his words.

And in the last few years, I met my dad again. I met an old man who's body was failing, who had lost his parents, his wife, a brother, a granddaughter, a nephew, and good friends, and who struggled deeply in his pain over these losses. Our conversations started to include thoughts about the afterlife and what he wanted me and my sister to do with his ashes.

And now, after his death, through messages and emails and texts and letters and voice recordings, I am meeting my father again. A man who did everything he could to take care of his family, a man who fiercely loved his daughters, a man who truly and unapologetically lived life his own way, the best friend to so many, a man who wrote letters and kept a strong connection with people because for him, people were the most important thing in his life. He knew what mattered.

And I guess if I had to sum up in one sentence the lesson his life taught me, it would be this: Love people - although it will always be imperfect and messy, never lose sight of that most important thing, love people. 

​I loved my dad. And now I get to meet myself again as I experience for the first time ever who I am in the world without him.
​
Steven Hackett, 08/24/50 - 01/19/21, my father, my friend