When you have to keep breathing in a world where your father no longer breathes, when you’re one of the ones who has lost your dad, or sit with how someday you will, somedays, even breathing can hurt.

It’s strange how you didn’t know until it’s too late:

How much safer the world feels when your father is in the world too.

How come it’s so easy to not realize who you’re quietly counting on, till they are no longer counted among the living?

It’s strange how you don’t know until it’s too late: How much safer the world feels when your father is in the world too.

How easy it is to not know how much your Dad moves like a sentry along the outer edges of your life, like your very own lookout keeping watch through the night, always on guard for your deep good.

How easy it is to not know how you can be a full-grown, with grown children of your own, and yet still be the child who longs to know her Dad isn’t far, but nearby and close.

“Fathers can be a watchtower always looking out for us, when we aren’t even looking.”

This is a mystery: Fathers can be a watchtower always looking out for us, when we aren’t even looking.

Fathers can be a shield that we didn’t even know we’ve gripped in a million battles.

Fathers can be the sure voice at the end of the line that feels more like a steadying lifeline.

Dads are our family repository for rare and uncommon knowledge, of all sorts of lost  how-to-do-itness and wonders, of our creased and tattered memories, the yellowed newsprint of our fading family tales.

Fathers are our fortresses of wisdom,
the keepers of the hacks,
and masters of the trade called Life.

“Listen long while they’re alive,
the silence will be so deafening when they’re gone.”

And now you find yourself looking at the calendar with Father’s Day coming and barely whispering:

How can there be so many things I forgot and didn’t hold on to,
because I magically thought I’d somehow always be holding on to you, Dad?

You knew it, but you didn’t, and now you’re telling it to anyone who cares to hear with the ears of their tender heart:

Listen long while they’re alive,
the silence will be so deafening when they’re gone.

And you may not have a Father to sign a Father’s Day card for this year, but you still know who you are:

You are still the daughter of a father whose eyes misted when he said your name.

You are still the daughter to a father who gave you his grit and his good tears at the end of every moving story, tears that rinse your soul of its scales so you can see the glorious romance of being alive.

You are still the daughter to a father who loved 49 Ford pickup trucks and worn Wrangler jeans and Welch’s grape juice with his grilled porkchops — and you are still the  daughter of a father who choked up when he’d close his eyes to say: “I love you too.”

“Your father is still with you, always still with you,

because how is there any other way for a true Father to be,

but like our Father:
Right here, always with  us.“

Your Dad may not be with you anymore and yet you know,  he will be with you for evermore.

You can close your eyes and open your heart and you can still see him:

Fathers are a singular gait you can still see coming down the street, like love looking for you, and fathers are a gate to a million places you can close your eyes and still return to anytime you need, and fathers are a remembered line in your mind at just the right time, and you find you’re never lost, you’re never alone, you are never forsaken.

Your father is still with you, always still with you, because how is there any other way for a true Father to be, but like our Father:

Right here, always with  us.