What Father’s Day Means to me?

This year will be another year that I face Father’s Day without the a key ingredient a father.

Usually as soon as June comes, I know that Father’s Day is in the month, but avoid looking at the calendar for the date. It is not until someone asks me about “what I am doing for Father’s Day” does it hit me again hard.

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When I say nothing since my dad passed away, I deflect the sympathy by saying that I am handling the situation. It has been ten years since he passed away and I’m trying to focus on the Father’s Days that I did spend with him.

I seem to be okay with this until, I start getting emails from Amazon, Hallmark, and other brands that spam my inbox from time to time started asking insensitive, albeit rhetorical, questions that caught me off guard; “Does your dad wear stocks” and “have you gotten your card” in the subject line.

It is easy for me to mad at these “insensitive” emails. I have thought many times to reply and slam these companies with a angry response. Shouldn’t some browser track my visits and see that I don’t visit these sites and that I fill out surveys and categorize me as “fatherless”? I hit the delete button hard and hope that my anger would resonate through the web, of course it does not.

Again it gets me thinking: How does one deal with these holidays and getting through them. I know that I am not the only faced with this: millions of fathers, mothers, children pass away and every year their birthdays. Mother’s and Father’s Days arrive all the time, What can you do?

I think about retreating into my grief as the day grows nearer. I try to keep quiet and internalize what I am dealing with on a daily basis. I lived with my dad up until he passed away. I was in early 30’s but my dad was in great health so the thought of death never came into my mind. In this day and age, people live a long time and my dad visited the doctor that week and was given a clean bill of health, why would I worry.

The fact that I got anger at an email is trivial I mean, but it is easy to be frustrated at these insensitive subject lines, but they are not what caused my dad’s death, nor will be what heals my grief. Jealously, seeing a father-daughter pair or pain when someone complains about their dad won’t either. And laying low? That doesn’t help me. Nor does it help the world that my dad left behind become any better than when he left it.

So, my plan is to the spend the day the way he would have. I’ll appreciate the time I spent with him, watch a tennis match on tv and yell at Roger Federer for not doing what I tell him and pretend my dad is telling me that you know he can’t hear you. That won’t stop me.

This won’t absolve the anger that I feel but it will help me make through a day and move to the next.

So in this moment I wish my friends, family and their dads the happiest Father’s Day they have ever had.