write me well

Tag: advice

  • Baseball caps but also, kindness

    Half a post a month is not my finest average. Don’t take it personally, 2025. I’ve had worse statistics, and this is most certainly a case of it’s not you, it’s me. In fact, if it makes you feel any better, there’s a notebook sitting somewhere in my house that has, at most, been visited three times this year. (Future Kathy: stop trying to make stone paper notebooks happen. The advertisements are slick but the paper is not. You will always hate writing in them.) 

    Even though it is impossible from a mathematical perspective for there to be fewer days of December before Christmas from one year to the next, this year the impossible feels possible. We’re as many days into the month as we are away from Christmas, and most of me feels like it’s still September.  

    This is for several reasons: aside from the atmospheric river we had this week, it has been a very mild fall/winter, so more than a few of our neighborhood trees still boast a thick mix of orange and red leaves. I’m also spending more time outside in our neighborhood, so it feels like a bigger deal than it probably is. Then we got our Christmas tree pretty early (in November!), but it’s a potted tree that we belatedly realized was dead dry, and we ended up needing to undecorate it and leave it outside in the rain for a few days. It’s been back inside since Tuesday, I think? But I haven’t really felt the Christmas spirit inspire me to redress it, so it is still naked, just two feet of very off-putting pokey needles, sitting by its lonesome in the window.  

    I guess that’s not exactly several things, but it’s enough. That and the universe being all universe-y have conspired to make it feel like Christmas is anything but a week from this Thursday.  

    Ignoring the fact that technically, it is not the season of winter, I have to say that winter as it feels right now is the most ridiculous thing. This is my third winter in the PNW, and my (pauses to count) ninth (NINTH!) one on this latitude, if you count all of the time I spent in the UK. When we moved here, I didn’t think that the short days would be all that much of an issue because I’d done it before, for years at a time, and been just fine. 

    What I did not reckon with was the longitude. In this particular part of the world: 1. The sun is not a £50 flight away. 2. Even if it was, you don’t get enough paid time off to buy the flight, take the flight, and go enjoy it. In short, it makes handling the dark days and the lack of sun a helluva lot more challenging.  

    The goal this winter is to be nicer to myself about being annoyed by that. It’s okay to do less and achieve less when all your body wants to do is…nothing. The progress gained over the past eight months of running is not undone by the fact that I’m only squeezing in two-ish runs a week right now. Because really: two-ish runs? In this lighting?? That is something to be celebrated! (Plus, brief flex, those runs are now up to a cool four miles each. Still feeling very Who Is She but I love it.)  

    In other silly and shouldn’t matter news but feels, well, very big? Is that for the first time in almost twenty years, I am growing out my hair. This is primarily an exercise to see just how white my gray hair will get, and it is going the best it has ever gone. I have made it through the most painful phases, the ones that do not bear describing, but I’m now stuck in the endless un-pony-tail-able bob phase that requires no fewer than eight bobby pins to be on hand at any given time (unless a hat is present). Because my hair is curly, it feels like all it has done for the past two months is grow outward and upward – every direction but the one desired. I have discovered in myself a love of baseball caps that I never thought possible (we’re all about the impossible in this post, I guess) and it makes me feel absurdly glam, the source of which I’m choosing to trace back to Princess Diana.  

    So really, I have achieved lots of things this year. Two very specific things that have plagued me as impossible for many years, and a handful of other things. What I’m trying to tell myself in this glummy winter vibe is that resolutions in the plural are rather insane things. It is absolutely okay, and to be expected, to really only achieve a thing or two. I have many years ahead of me in which to achieve more things. Who’s to say I don’t continue this habit, and each year tackle 1-2 new resolutions? Multiply that out across a lifetime and that is SO MANY THINGS! We should all be nicer to ourselves. We should not take it personally when we don’t make everything happen on the timeline we envisioned, en masse and concurrently and as if just getting through to Friday is not, some weeks, a big-ass achievement. 

    Bringing this full circle, much of this is coming from my sensitivity to the fact that I have not, indeed, written very much at all this year. I truly thought I’d found a project earlier in the spring but it has since died a death, and no other writing projects have come to take its place. And if I am being honest, I really wanted that to be one of my Achievements this year. Whereas growing out my hair or starting to run are exciting new things that I can add to my identity roster, writing has been so long a front-row feature of that list that it’s becoming really hard to not take my lack of writing personally.  

    But there is so much time to fix that. It’ll come back around. It’s not you, writing, it’s me. I’ll figure it out. I’m being kinder to myself and celebrating the small wins, like right now: when I dropped by the library to return a few books, and instead of walking right back out, I sat down at a computer, tabled my purse and my plans to grocery shop, and for the first time since university spent time writing at a library, writing this post.  

  • Timing

    It’s not lost on me that I’m writing this seated at a coffee shop in Hillcrest, fresh from a visit to Balboa Park with a friend of two decades. I’m visiting San Diego for the first time in five years and it’s as fantastic as I remember: just a bit balmy when I stepped off the plane at eight o’clock yesterday morning, already regretting I’d only be here for thirty-six hours, the harbor and rolling green hills and palm-trees-galore totally unchanged. I booked in a double tattoo appointment a few months ago and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. Post appointment and hangouts with my friend (and missing out on a few because of the timing), I wish I’d made it a real trip and had three more days.

    Alas, that’s life. I’m grateful to even be able to make the trip all things considered. The last time I was on a plane, I was one of thirty-seven people, making the mid-pandemic journey from London to San Francisco because I realized about two weeks after my last post that it was time for another major life shift.

    It’s worked out in that I never left California because I didn’t like California. I, in fact, rather love California (see last post for reference). I spent a month in Sacramento before relocating back to the Bay Area, drawn there unexpectedly by an opportunity with my old District Manager to take over a store in Santa Cruz. Living in such a recent past haunt makes the three years I spent in London feel more than a little like a fever dream – a hyper-realistic, life-changing, fantastic fever dream – and being in San Diego again is like another small dose of the same confusing nostalgia. It’s welcome, though. I’ll take any reminder that here or abroad, the places I love aren’t going anywhere. (For now, at least. This is a no doom-scrolling zone.)

    Talking with my friend this afternoon at the park, the phrase “life is a journey” came up. We were joking, but we also were not. We were talking about how life happens and you do things and once they’ve happened, it is what it is. There’s no right or wrong about it, and all you can do is change what you have now if you’re not happy about it. It was an excellent topic of conversation for someone that’s gone through the intense volume of change I have in the past four months.

    I keep getting Instagram and Facebook memories of a year ago, two years ago, three years ago (the most painful, since they’re from my recent arrival to the UK and filled with obnoxious captions like “can’t believe I get to live here FOREVER”). I made the right decision, moving back to California. But I miss London and my life there – desperately, sometimes. As another close friend of mine is fond of reminding me, two things can be true at once. It was the right decision, but sometimes it’s still hard.

    I got to go to my niece’s preschool graduation and mermaid-themed fifth birthday party. I can go out to lunch with or go spend my day off with my sisters or my mom, wandering thrift shops or discovering the best fried chicken sandwiches. I laid by the pool with my best friend and drank margaritas, and remembered for a moment why it’s so easy to not travel when you live somewhere like California: sometimes just the backyard can feel like a vacation. I’ve got a car and drive through pine-filled mountains every day on my way to work, and live in a neighborhood with a coffee shop I can walk to – not to mention the fact that I get to share the place with my boyfriend, a miracle in itself because I’ve known the guy for fifteen years and life is just really fun (and fantastic) that way sometimes, and things have just, well, worked out.

    When I look back at the last three years, I am nothing but proud. If there is anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can think you know exactly what you want and what’s next, and turns out – you 100% do not. And that’s okay.

  • The Impossible Thing About Self Worth (…and capitalism)

    I sat across from my friend at the Market Hall in Victoria, warmly sequestered inside brick walls, surrounded by nine-to-five suits on their trendy lunch break, drinking the best latte I’ve had in months, wondering how on earth this beautiful person in front of me could possibly feel incapable.

    To me, she had so much to offer. A ceaseless, passionate energy, a way with words that a troubadour would envy – blonde mermaid’s hair and a knack for making any marbled knit sweater drape perfectly from her well-postured shoulders. And I sat there, thinking these things, knowing that she was envious of so much about my life. My career, my stability, my trajectory. She was afraid the way so many of us have been throughout the course of our lives, because she has no idea what’s next or how to get there. As we both sipped our lattes and went about splitting a chocolate muffin between us, I realized I was just as jealous of her.

    It struck me like a crack of cold air in that rosy warm space that the both of us thought we were in exactly opposite positions, when really, we were exactly the same. And I can’t help looking around me and feeling strangely like many of the amazing women I know in my life are in this same position and that it is total and complete bull shit.

    Waxing poetic about the downsides of capitalism isn’t something I’m generally drawn to. In fact, writing about anything that has a semblance of cultural importance is almost always beyond both my interest and remit. But the past few weeks have been such a trial and filled with instances of questioning what is worth – what is value – why do we do what we do? That even I, Piscean and ENFP and optimistic to a blistering, painful fault, feel compelled to address it. Why is it that we so aggressively measure ourselves against anything other than wellness and happiness? Why are so many careers, about things that so resoundingly do not matter, valued so highly?

    I wonder these things, three hours after my latte with my friend, in a different hipster coffee shop, now upgraded to a matcha latte, and realize that there is a very simple reason I don’t often contemplate these kinds of things. It’s fucking terrifying. If I think about it for more than five minutes, it’s like trying to wrap my head around a black hole (or space in general, which to me is not the final frontier: it is a terrifying endless mystery that I have no interest in considering or peering into).

    Only this black hole isn’t something I can wilfully ignore (because really, will I ever have to confront SPACE?). I have to participate in and engage with this black hole every day. I have to try and figure out what it’s actually all about so I can decide what my next career move is. I have to measure myself against its fathomless fiscal depths before I can give myself a speck of confidence that I’m on the right path. And that’s what really scares me.

    Keeping my nose stuck firmly in the past has long been my defensive tactic. A belief as unshakeable as it is absurd, that not knowing what the future holds validates not planning for it, sits nestled at the base of my spine, and it impractically refuses to dislodge. I focus on the lives of people that lived eight hundred years before me, people who even had we shared the same time would have been worlds away from me, and I can’t stop. I visit the places they lived, see the buildings they built, stand in the churches they prayed in, and feel a sense of connection and belonging, a strength of spirit, that I’ve come to live for. I tell myself that those experiences are the ones that matter, that they’re more important than the big picture – because maybe there is no big picture. And as far as defensive tactics go, it worked really well!

    Right up until everything blew up in my face.

    In the back of my mind, I always had a deeply underappreciated belief that not only was I great at my (capitalist) job, but that I would always be great at it and that there was nowhere to go but up. It wasn’t until about two months ago that everything changed and suddenly I was sat on my own, looking in the mirror, wondering what I was really good for, and where I could possibly go.

    A crisis of career confidence is never a pleasant experience. This was my first. I’ve had them before in the sense that I wished I could be a writer, a novelist, a columnist – anything that involved people loving my writing and paying me to produce it – and that I never was granted said wish. But then, I never really tried that hard. I always knew that the only thing to regret in that regard was that I hadn’t truly bothered. As a manager, though, since the moment one of my first DM’s sat me down and told me I was great, I had the luxury of lacking self-doubt of any kind. I knew I was good at my job, I knew I deserved good things, and I loved that about it. It gave me value and worth and I reaped wonderful rewards from it for years. This crisis of confidence was about that job, the one I was actually doing, not some intangible dream job crisis. It profoundly shook me up and prompted a resounding, excruciating, “WHY?”

    When I was living in San Jose before I moved back to England, I had everything going for me. If there was a time to be complacent, that was it. Stellar roommate, great job, ace colleagues, and my family close by. But I knew I was missing something and it was that sensation that brought me back over here. In attempting to answer that big old “WHY”, I’ve realized that maybe I had reached a level of stability that was endangering my life’s path, leaving me complacent when that wasn’t in the cards yet. Because let’s be real – would I be out here, asking these big questions, reconsidering a path I long since thought was sorted out, if the past two months hadn’t happened? No fucking way!

    Wasn’t this supposed to be about other women too, though, you ask? And capitalism in general? You’re right. Selfishly, my own turn in fortune has brought to light a bigger picture conversation about valuing a bottom line over the hard work of the people you employ. Customer service and retail are the absolute bowels of that aspect of capitalism. Where else can you work your ass off and yet everyone you work for – customers and big wig bosses – have a free pass to shit on you over PRODUCT?

    OVER PRODUCT.

    I have long been in this career for two reasons: people and their development. I am actively looking out for the people the brands I work for employ, trying to help them find what drives them, making sure they have a good thing going and that work isn’t just a place they come to pick up a pay check. My teams drive great service because they are supported and validated. It’s certainly not because they’re being paid exceedingly well or feel like they’re changing the world. But every day, we’re doing our job, and doing it well. If people can’t see that – or if they can, but they don’t think it’s enough – then maybe I am in the wrong field. And maybe I did need a kick in the teeth to realize I need to do this somewhere else.

    Which brings me to today’s coffee with my friend. That moment where we spent hours talking about the endless spread of opportunities in this world of simple rules – work for the man, get your money, do your thing on your own time – that starting from scratch is just as inspiring as it is terrifying. And I wondered at the ridiculousness of being able to preach that so confidently to her when I knew that I as soon as she got on her train and I went my separate way, that I would do anything but give myself the same advice. If she has endless choice, why don’t I?

    The answer is, I do. We all do. If we really want to take the advice that (particularly when you’re inordinately privileged by birth) the only thing stopping you is you, we can. But it feels real fucking impossible right now even though nothing is really that bad. So the next step is to get myself to believe it.

    How am I going to do that? Start with small truths, the ones that are easiest to swallow. I’ll begin with the illusive bright side, the mercurial silver lining of essentially getting demoted. Maybe the universe realized I didn’t so much need a job that was stressing me out beyond all belief, but that I needed the friendship of all of my amazing colleagues, something I’d denied myself due to a rigorous belief in drawing professional lines as a manager. Maybe I needed that kick to dislodge that feeling at the base of my spine – that not planning for the future is an okay life policy – and create a long game strategy. Maybe I needed the spare brain space that having less responsibility leaves me with to wrap my head around the exhilaration (and terror) of a fresh start.

    I genuinely have no idea where I’m going to go from here. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way about my life. But slowly, one day at a time, I’m going to indoctrinate that philosophy deep in my bones until I breathe its truth every day. Because the world IS filled with opportunities – I do believe that – and it’s up to me to grab them. And sure, there’s a lot of really shitty shit out there too, but if I can’t be one of the people out there turning it around, helping to give value to those amazing women that feel like they don’t have anything to offer, then what else am I gonna do?

    Time to get out there, to motivate, to encourage, to make them laugh and smile and get inspired. I may not yet drink my Koolaid, but I’ve got a tepid matcha latte, and that’s kind of the same thing, right? It’s time to do something bigger and be part of a solution. Retail isn’t shitty because it’s unworthy and filled with people that never tried hard. It’s shitty because all too often it thrives on the ceaseless and thankless work of countless people all for the glory of capitalism. While I’m in it, I’m going to continue to fight for those people and the struggles they face every day. But big picture, it’s time to figure out how I can do that in a bigger way.

    The unknown I’m about to face while I try and figure that out is not like space because it is terrifying (it is).

    It is like space because it is limitless.

  • The Terrifying Thing About Content

    Content. Whoof. There’s a word to casually instill fear on an otherwise unassuming Monday morning. I have fought many mediocre battles in my life, but the battle to create content is my longest-standing, and right now it’s sitting right around Kathy: 0, Content: 1,000,000. 

    Any time you find something to measure your self-worth with, life gets terrifying real quick. For (my type of) creative, the definitive measure of self-worth is the ability to create things that interest some section of the general populous. The bar for this ability feels Everest-high, unachievable, the sort of thing you have to pay a Sherpa thousands of dollars to help you every step of the you’ll-probably-die-on-the-journey way. It takes one flip through a glossy magazine for me to feel equally inspired and idiotic. 

    But then, enter the internet. A quick scroll through any feed and the retina is greeted by articles, listicles, and content of a fairly non-threatening variety. It feels somewhat accessible and, dare I think it, achievable! Suddenly the bar is lowered, temptingly so, and you sit there and go, “Y’know, I can do that. If an article of reposted Tumblr memes can get clicks, then I, too, can get clicks!” 

    So you do the thing. You sit down at the coffee shop with your latte, artisanal sourdough toast, and whipped honey butter, and do your damnedest to write some bona fide interesting content.  

    And THAT’S when it happens. WHAM – you realize something so deafening, so critically offensive, that you don’t know how to handle it.  

    You don’t have anything all that interesting to say.  

    Worse, and perhaps just applicable to me, you realize something more terrifying: you do have something interesting to say, but interesting is a relative term, and your relative version of it is that everything you have to say somehow relates to the pop culture of years 1995-2008 – those in which your own culture was cold-pressed, fermented, grown, whatever – and if there is one thing that paying websites aren’t interested in, it’s really, really specific nattering about Meg Ryan films and how underrated the film Titan A.E. is.  

    What’s so terrifying about content is that like any slice of self-reflection put out for the masses, it gets held up to the lens of everyone else’s standards. What you thought was cool is not cool according to MaryUnicorn007 or Stan McClusky from Bend, Oregon. It’s definitely not cool or interesting to the Huffington Post, or Vogue, or Vice. So as you throw your 1,500 words out into the great void that is the internet, you hear them knock, hollow and unexpectedly, against a back wall you never saw, before clattering to the floor where your mother and sisters will be the only ones to ever read them.  

    Content. Maybe the content itself isn’t terrifying, but what everyone is about to think, or not think, about it, certainly is.   

    What turns that terror into beauty is that it so, deeply, profoundly, doesn’t fucking matter. Yeah, it does if you’re trying to pay the rent with it. But ask any freelancer, any writer that’s managed to go from hobby to hustle to full-time gig, and they’ll tell you that if great money is solely what you’re after, you’re in the wrong trade. Writers write to relate to others. To get their thoughts out there to help others. To form a club of cool losers who are on the same page about this one particular thing. To brighten a day or educate a stranger. And they’re right: if you want to get rich, you’re in the wrong trade. Which brings me to why I stopped stressing about content and made this very website happen. 

    If there is any one thing you can find that increases the likelihood of a smile, why on earth wouldn’t you want more of it in your life? It’s nobody’s business how interesting that smile-starter is to other humans. Put it out there if it makes you happy. Put it out there if it’s only going to get one unique view per day (from you, when you check the website to remind yourself that yes, it was the best idea to pick that font for the header, because look at how fucking amazing it looks). Create content for you, in every facet of your life, and you can’t come out the other end a loser. Or at least, if you do, I’ll think you’re a very cool loser.  

    There’s been a bit of an unaddressed hiatus here at Viv + Kit for the past few months, and to be honest, it’s because my life has been a bit of a shambles since July 27, 2019. I haven’t been able to get ahead of things or find balance or have great vision and control since my dad died and my work got unexpectedly unstable. It’s been a fear of being interesting, of creating content “worth” reading, that’s kept me off of here. I feel like a thorough fuck up right now – what on earth could I have to throw into the void that’s going to do anything for anyone?

    But sometimes the moments where you feel like all you’re doing is tripping from one fuck up to the next are the moments when you draw the best conclusions. Even if I don’t, the one thing I absolutely need more of in my life is what I love. What makes me smile. That has always been, and will always be, writing. So in a way, while it feels like the birth of this website two weeks before my life imploded was, shall we say, the most shit timing ever, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s exactly what I needed.  

    So stick around for the content, or don’t. I’ll still be here, creating it. Because that’s what makes me happy.  

  • Grief, Or Something Like It

    There are phone calls, and then there are phone calls.

    The second kind become great, memorable divides, minutes-long exchanges that separate Life Before and Life After. They’re the kind that tell you about something that’s already happened, while you’ve been blithely unaware, and suddenly the world shifts. You can’t unhave them and you can’t forget them. Saturday, July 27th, I got the second kind of phone call from my sister. Two transatlantic flights, one attempt to go back to work before I was ready, and some bone-deep jet lag later, I’m still coming to terms with the fact that my dad has died.

    When I went home to visit my family last February, I decided well in advance that I would try to specifically get my dad to engage. He was living with my mom and sister in Georgia and they were taking care of him, a task that became more mammoth as his Type II Diabetes (and stubborness) wore on. His behavior was the same unchanged pattern of the last seven trying years: solving puzzles online, reading articles online, and watching Netflix. Determined to squeeze something else out of him in the six days I visited, and with the resiliance of spirit of someone that didn’t have to deal with his increasingly difficult personality every day, I brought the game Catch Phrase.

    My family has always been terrible at enjoying each other’s complete company. Terrible is a strong word, but the truth of it is that there aren’t a lot of situations where all five of us in the same room ends up being much fun. But the surest fire way to achieve fun throughout childhood was a good card game. It was how my parents had passed their honeymoon and it was still a solid strategy three daughters later. Catch Phrase wasn’t a card game, but I thought it was a better bet, because it forced conversation. You can’t play Catch Phrase – basically $100,000 Pyramid in a pass-around electronic form – without talking to each other excessively. Ideally, also, it would involve a whole lot of laughing.

    Skeptical at first, my dad eventually acquiesced and the four of us sat in the living room, listening to John Anderson, playing Catch Phrase. And I will be forever grateful for that stupid little game, because in those few nights, I saw more of the old dad I remembered than I had seen in years. Sure, before and after he was unchanged, returning to his room and his puzzles once we’d finished. But the during – his thoughtful descriptions, his raised eyebrow at our own, less-than-thoughtful ones, the gleam of genuine amusement and following laughter when the buzzer went off the second he handed the game to my sister – the during I’ll remember forever.

    My dad was a wildly successful workaholic for the majority of my childhood. He’d been a regular full-time employee in the IBM-led tech world of the 1980’s before I was born, but for my entire memorable existence he’d been a charismatic contractor, selling his expertise to assorted companies across a variety of sectors. His contracts would take him all over the county, oftentimes all over the state, and they always paid him very well. My dad loved providing for his family and was fiercely passionate about it; he derived the majority of his joy in life from work, the sense of purpose and affluence it gave him, and most importantly, his ability to support his family. What he didn’t get from that (or our love, of course), he happily got from eating extraordinarily well. My dad was a big guy, and it took big food to keep him that way.

    There wasn’t much that stopped him, either, regardless of what he wanted. He had a steel will that was terrifying to behold, and not just as his child. I imagine dealing with my father in the workplace could be as horrifying as it was inspiring. He had a zero-tolerance policy for bull shit – a life motto of “No Surprises” and “You Can’t Fix Stupid” – that even extended to being too silly in the car. (During an ill-advised family road trip to Louisiana, one of only two such family vacations we went on in my entire childhood, we lost the privilege of going to a theme park on the way due to excessive silliness in the car.)

    In a family with a 4:1 female-to-male ratio, you’d think we would have ended up a pretty emotive, demonstrative bunch. But that was far from the truth. I never, ever doubted that my dad loved me. How he chose to show it, though, was in the way he provided for us, in the experiences he could give us, and from time to time, in a charming affability that made us realize that while poorly-timed silliness on our terms was something he had little patience for, silliness on his own terms was something he enjoyed sharing with us very much. The way my dad expressed love was usually never through words, and, not in the hollow way it sounds, almost always expressed through money. Taking us out to dinner. Paying for our favorite clothes and toys. Buying me an oboe after he’d just bought me a flute because I had the instrumental constancy of, well, an eleven year old. Dad loved us by spoiling us, and he loved it well.

    An imposing six-foot-three inches, confident, mustached, the definition of the sort of gentleman that can only buy his suits at the Big and Tall store: that was the guy I grew up with, and I was often in awe of him. We didn’t talk about a lot, but I loved listening to him, and most of my young memories of him are more of just going on rides with him than anything else. (He was a major fan of driving.) My sisters and I spent many an hour standing behind his office chair, peering at his computer monitor over his shoulder, impatient for him to finish explaining his newest Excel spreadsheet. And while we didn’t always have the same opinions, we could always be sure he would share his, and he always spoke with authority and inflection on most any subject at hand. He could sear you and your opinions with a look.

    I share all of this so you can understand just how hard it was to process the person he became after 2008, the person I visited last February.

    Between the sudden death of his best friend, who was almost ten years his junior, and the economic recession, which slowly saw the last of his contracts permanently dry up, my dad was a vastly different person from 2008 onwards. Never a man of many hobbies, with no work to keep him busy, he became a recluse, hyper conscious of the family budget and more inclined to spend time looking up minutia on the internet than to spend it speaking with any of us. Despite numerous efforts to network, he continually struggled to find any new jobs. Eventually he just stopped looking.

    It sounds so simple in hindsight, but it took us years to realize he was depressed, and years more to talk to him about it. But by the time we did, it was too late. Maybe because he thought it was weak, maybe because he genuinely did not think anything could be changed, maybe because he simply did not have the wherewithal to try – whatever his reasons, he never did anything to try and fix it. For seven years, it got progressively harder to keep the faith that he would ever manage to. From the moment I got that phone call from my sister, I realized a harsh truth: now, he never would.

    Losing your dad is never easy, but my dad’s health had been waning for years, and he had not been “himself” for a decade. I genuinely thought I had done most of my mourning for the person that raised me, because so much of him was already gone. Boy, was I wrong. I hadn’t realized that however much I had accepted where he currently was, that was NOT the same as him being gone. While he was still alive, there was still a chance – however impossible, however small – that he would rally. That the dad I had grown up with, dynamic and confident and charming and vital, would come back. I don’t think I will ever stop being sad that he just couldn’t. Because of his depression.

    Worse, it hurts that he never felt like he could talk to us about it. I would have given anything to lend just five minutes of my own drive and self confidence to my dad – from whom, through both nature and nuture, so much of those qualities were sourced – to get him to see he had the strength to get through it. To see that it wasn’t weakness to talk about it, that we absolutely knew he still loved and cared about us. To see that he didn’t need money to prove it and that all we wanted was for him to express it through words. All we wanted was a conversation about something other than the weather, a day spent on something other than puzzles and streaming more NCIS.

    My dad had advanced Type II Diabetes, Congestive Heart Failure, and was severely overweight. He passed peacefully in his sleep on a Saturday morning from a combination of his physical ailments. But I would argue that depression was his deepest illness, and that I couldn’t help him with it will always be one of my deepest regrets. I have my suspicions, but the truth is I’ll never know what it was that stopped my dad from being able to share what he was going through. All I know is he was painfully good at faking otherwise – he was always “doing good”. So in his memory, I want to take the time to say that if you are reading this, and you are “doing good”, you may not feel ready to talk about it yet. But I want you to know that when you are, I am someone that will always be here to listen.

    I didn’t know how to help my dad and so I settled for telling him that I loved him, showing him that I loved him. It wasn’t much towards the end – if I could change how often I called him over the last year, God you know I would – but I know as much as you can know anything in this life that he knew he was loved. Sometimes that is the best that you can do.

    It sounds stupid, so basic, but the strangest part of death is that no matter where you go, you will never find that person. No matter where you go. But there is a constant comfort in memories, perfect and imperfect, and while I will be sad for a long time, I will also be okay. I will move forward and eventually stop having those cutting, random thoughts – that my dad won’t ever know the person I marry, that he won’t get to see my neices grow up – and realize that for my dad, this was the best case scenario. More than anything, I will always be grateful for the time I did have, and everything wonderful he did give me. Because old those memories may be, but they will never fade, nor will their impact, nor my image – strong, dynamic, and loving – of my dad.