Photo of Sumiko, Robert, and Scott Saulson take by Carolyn Saulson
Driving in my car, I remember the day that you took me to the department of motor vehicles to take my driving test. You took me twice, because the first time I failed it due to my inability to parallel park. These are the types of father/daughter stories that usually involve teenage children, but I wasn’t a kid anymore.
I was thirty-nine.
Listening to the radio, “Wonderwall” by Oasis comes on and I remember singing it with your youngest granddaughter at your funeral. We were all emotion and awkwardness then, and I was afraid to stand next to a corpse.
Daddy, I am no good with dying. I still can’t understand it. Maybe I never will.
I remember last Christmas, the last Christmas we would ever spend together. I remember sitting on your bed opening piles of presents because you were too sick to come into the living room. I remember taking pictures with my niece’s iPad because I wanted to makes sure we had photos, to keep your image fresh in our memories.
The photo is an image of you, my father. You were wracked with pain, shrunken and diminutive, at war with the internal invading army of killing cancer cells, sitting on the bed, eating kettle corn. We watched the Amish Mafia because you had developed a strange fascination with it. We also watched it because you were too ill to sit through a full length movie.
The last movie we watched together was Prometheus on DVD.
We couldn’t watch The Hobbit together, because although you wanted to see it, you were too sick to go to a movie theater. Now, it is a year later.
All I want for Christmas is to be with my father, sitting in a room with my father, doing the things we are able to do. I want to sip hazelnut creamer laced coffee with my dad, my beloved dad, my imperfect dad, my dad, the only dad I ever had… here on Earth, anyway.
I believe in a Heavenly Father, but you did not, my Earthly Father, fatally flawed father of a son and a daughter, my cool dad who used to write on a motorcycle with the wind whipping through his hair, a rebel, decrying the helmet laws. You were an atheist.
You were my Sharper Image dad, who we teasingly called Inspector Gadget, and who took me to see Alien in a theater when it came out, and you were also pretty sharp, MENSA man, Dr. Who fan, super-dad of an artsy, nerdy little girl.
They tell me I remind them of you. That’s a compliment.
You believed in genetic memory, the type that is in Dune, and is also in The Moon Cried Blood, and I am editing it, you know: The Moon Cried Blood. You did, and we do honor your memory when we are kind to our fellow family members and we try to be together and to apply the salve of forgiveness to our aging emotional wounds.
I try harder to be a family in your memory.
You always wanted us to get along.
So my brother is coming over, with your youngest granddaughter, and my mom who you were friends with for life even after the divorce, and I hope your oldest granddaughter will come, too. I hope they are all here to see it through, to be together for this first winter without you.
When it came to family you did what you do but you were, too, truly a family man, and I can’t stand it, to see your core values abandoned by petty infighting unwarranted among those who should be delighting in seeing your heritage, your testament, your bloodline, your people.
I cried over this letter, daddy. I cried while I wrote it. I just hope that you know how much I love you. I always loved you. I loved you sitting up sick all night watching Danger Mouse when I was twelve, and I loved you when we all went to see movies together in Culver City. I loved that you were always in my life, even though you and my mom were divorced.
I miss you so much that all attempts at eloquence in this desperate expression of me pleading with memories stacked on empty chairs absent space, where your presents are not there, where your presence is felt, where I decry the lack of you. When my cat cast a shadow at the window, I imagined it was you at my door.
But you never came here.
You were never well enough to visit my home.
But your family will be here tomorrow, comforting each other during our first winter without you.
About the Author
The author of three sci-fi/horror novels, “Solitude,” “Warmth”, and “The Moon Cried Blood, and short story anthology “Things That Go Bump In My Head.” Born to African-American and Russian-Jewish parents, she is a native Californian, and has spent most of her adult life in the Bay Area
https://www.sumikosaulson.com
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