Dum Vita Est, Spes Est
Where there is life, there is hope
I started dreading Father’s Day weeks ago.
It came over me suddenly, like a storm you didn’t realize was on the way until you hear the rain pounding on the roof.
I was out doing my weekend deliveries, being reminded by marketing everywhere I went that the day was coming. I watched as young fathers pushed their little ones in shopping carts through stores, blissfully unaware of how fast it all goes under the best of circumstances, let alone when daily fatherhood is cut unnaturally short.
What does being a father consist of? Is it a mere biological fact? Is it relational, and if so, what are the parameters? Can you really be a dad when you only get to see your kids for fewer than 1% of your waking hours?
Can fatherhood be taken away, or is it inviolable, like an indelible mark left upon the soul?
My anxiety ramped up so badly on that particular Saturday that I eventually made myself sick, spending the night with cold sweats and fever dreams about strange alien cocoons in a pitch-dark, abandoned house. The occupants of those uncanny bundles were inhuman, but had the faces of human children.
But then, a couple of days later, my 20-year-old daughter Sophia pierced my endless rumination with an unexpected phone call as I was walked through the frozen aisle of a Food Lion, filling my cart with someone else’s groceries.
She said she was trying to plan for Father’s day, and wanted to know if there was anything in particular I wanted to do, or any special meal I wanted to eat. The details didn’t matter to me. She had shined a bright ray of hope into the darkness of my fear and grief.
Aside from being a beautiful and strikingly intelligent young woman, Sophie (what we’ve always called her, despite her legal name ending with an “a”) is somehow a fusion of the best traits of her two wildly different parents. She has a mind much like my own, along with my love for language and art and beauty, and is a budding writer herself. But she has her mother’s fierceness, her drive and tenacity, and an unwillingness to let anyone stand in her way.
She is, of course, also very much her own person. Like all children, she is more than the sum of her parental parts.
The intervening weeks came and went, and suddenly I found myself on Friday before Father’s Day, having another particularly grief-stricken afternoon, and realizing I’d never given her the answers about what I wanted that she’d asked me for.
I didn’t want her to think I was just ignoring her efforts, so I sent her a text:
I know you wanted more from me on Father’s Day. The truth is, I have no idea how to handle it. This is my first time after being forced to leave, and every time I think about it I get so sad I just shut down.
I miss seeing you guys every day. I miss feeling like I’m able to be any kind of real father at all. Of all the things I’m grieving, this is the thing that hurts the most.
I don’t want to put that on you, I just want to explain. It means the world to me that you asked, and I don’t want you to feel ignored or like it doesn’t matter. It really does. I just can’t find an answer.
I don’t want to spend a lot. I just want to see my kids and maybe eat whatever and just try to get through the day without crying.
I’m sorry I’ve not been more help. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, and I’m a wreck.
Over the next 24 hours, we texted back and forth about logistics. She asked me if I wanted to go out for coffee with her on Father’s Day, before going over to the old house.
Of course, I said yes.
We went to a little place near downtown, a shop that was tucked away in a spot so hidden I’d never seen it, even though it was just a few miles from my place. She suggested it because she knew it had gluten free pastries, so I could actually have a treat to go with my standard plain iced latte. My 10 year old daughter Mia came with her, and we sat and talked for over an hour before deciding it was time to head over to the house to make home-made Chinese hot pot for dinner. I met Sophie and Jamie at the local Asian supermarket, where they were gathering vegetables and mushrooms and the ingredients for the soup base. I bought dried bean curd and jasmine iced tea and enough meat to make sure my teenage sons all got their fill. Paper-thin slices of lamb, and pork, and beef.
My boys came downstairs when I arrived at the house with the groceries. There were greetings and hugs, and as we talked, we got into a spirited debate over the merits of generative AI, after I showed them a recent video I’d made with it. My kids are very tech savvy, but they all have strong anti-AI inclinations, a phenomenon I find fascinating. I’m so used to young people being the first adopters of new tech, I am always somewhat surprised that so many Gen Z kids have a real instinctual hatred for AI — and generative AI in particular. They talked about it being antithetical to the human experience that inspires real art, and writing, and music, and film. Sophie in particular described all AI art as “soulless,” and said she’d never seen a single instance she considered beautiful. They made clear that they didn’t have any interest in consuming content that wasn’t made by actual people. I told them I wasn’t there to change their mind, just to understand their position, but it still took on the tenor of a friendly debate.
We ate. Hot pot is a perfect meal for extended conversation, a boiling pot of broth sitting in the center of the table, cooking small bits of meat and vegetables in it a few pieces at a time as everyone partakes of the communal fare. When we were done, and the mess was cleared away, Sophie told me she’d stayed up until 3AM making me a gluten free apple pie. I looked ruefully at it, because it looked incredible, but I was way too full to take another bite. I told everyone to take their desired share of the pie, and whatever was left, I’d bring home with me.
Then she brought me a bag full of gifts, which I didn’t expect at all. She’d already bought me coffee and baked me a pie.
She’d already made sure I knew I wasn’t forgotten.
I removed the gifts from the bag one at a time: a candle scented with sandalwood and smoke — an exact replica of one I already had in my apartment that was getting low, though I doubt she knew that when she bought it. She just knows me. Mementos from the road trip she and my son Ivan just took across the country a few weeks ago, including an alien-themed magnet from New Mexico and a cool resin-molded bas-relief photo of Carlsbad Caverns — a place we all tried to visit on our last-ever family road trip two summers ago, but got there too late for admission. A notebook with a durable vinyl cover and a package of Pilot G2 pens (long my favorite writing implement). A funny “Hop on Pop”-themed card sealed in an envelop with blood-red wax, emblazoned with her signet — a stylized letter S. And a wooden picture frame with hand-burned filigrees, and an inscription at the top that read, “Dum Vita Est, Spes Est.”
“My Latin’s not great,” I said. “What does this mean? Something life is…”
“Where there is life, there is hope.” She said.
I managed to stay stoic last night when she told me, but I couldn’t even write that line just now without being seized by an unexpected spasm of sobs.
She had seen how deep my pain is, and met it with equal force.
“The frame was supposed to have a picture of the family in it,” she said, exasperation in her voice, “but I can’t ever get everyone together while there’s still enough daylight to take it.”
“I’ll leave the frame with you, then,” I said, “until you can manage that.”
She was trying to give me the gift of the family I had to leave behind, so I could take them with me.
I thanked her for everything. The boys and I talked a little about whether I wanted to play a PC game with them when I got home. Then Eli came and asked me when I was going to come sit with him so we could watch our show. In the old days, before I had to leave, we’d gotten in the habit of watching Trent the Traveler together. I hadn’t realized he was waiting for me.
At first, he sat with his mom. He put on an old episode, the one where Trent goes to Japan with a group of people who follow his YouTube channel. One we’d watched several times. I wasn’t sure if he chose it because it was one we’d watched together before I was gone, or if it was just the way his little ASD brain gravitates towards watching the same familiar things over and over and over again. After a minute or two, he got up from the chair with his mom and came over to sit with me.
“So I’m going to Japan next Spring,” Sophie said, after coming in and seeing what was on the TV. This was news to both her mother and I. Her best friend’s family invited her to go with them, and I felt a pang of jealousy mixed with genuine happiness and excitement for her.
I was supposed to go to Japan, back in the summer of 2001, when I was just 3 years older than she is now. I’d been offered a job teaching English there. But my friend Tony, who had applied with me, had not been given the same offer, and I didn’t want to go so far away from home alone. So on a whim, I’d moved to Phoenix with Tony and one of my other close friends instead. That was where I met Jamie two months later, and my life went in a totally different direction.
I never did get the chance to go to Japan after that. I traveled a lot when I was young, but things get complicated when you get married and start having kids. It’s still on my list of things I would very much like to do, even if some of the luster in the idea has faded over the years.
A few minutes later, I noticed that Eli had fallen asleep, as I sat next to him, holding his hand. I carried him to bed, and went upstairs to tuck Mia in and say goodnight to my boys, who were all gaming together in the office on the second floor, at my old desk.
It will never stop feeling weird, walking out of that life like a visitor, and going “home” to a place that cannot, by definition, ever feel like home.
Sophie walked me out to my car, and we ended up standing there talking for another two hours in the dark. We talked about heartbreak, and she finally got to tell me the story of what happened with the boy she’d been in love with who had slipped away last year, right in the middle of our family coming apart. It hit me then just how much grief of her own she’d had to bear, losing her relationship and her parents’ relationship at the same time. She’s strong as steel, but at one point, the emotion overcame her, and I did the only thing I could, and wrapped her in my arms as she spoke through her tears. I did my best to try to help her understand what might have happened, since she, like me, never got any real closure on what went so wrong that things that still mattered had to come to an end. We talked about how strange it is that someone you didn’t vote for to be in charge of you could have the unilateral power to completely change your life.
I started to feel exhaustion coming over me fast, and looked at my watch. It was nearly 1AM. I told her I had to go, but that we should get together for coffee more often, and continue our conversations. I could certainly use the company, and it seemed that she needed more than a peer to talk about her life with. She liked that idea, and told me I just needed to invite her. (I’m notorious for not planning even simple things like this, so there was some gentle chiding in the suggestion.)
Before I opened my door to leave, I felt the need to say one more thing.
“You saved me,” I said, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice. “I’ve been dreading this day for a long time. I don’t know how to do Father’s Day when I don’t even feel like I get to be a father anymore.”
“I know,” she replied.
“Thank you. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
And I said goodnight, and watched the tiny little girl who used to sleep on my chest walk back into the garage as an incredibly impressive young woman. The garage door closed slowly like the scroll of the end credits of a movie as I started the car and pulled out of the driveway.
It’s the best Father’s Day I could have asked for after all that’s happened. In fact, because of that, it’s probably the most meaningful one I’ve ever had.
“Where there is life, there is hope.”
I looked it up after I got back to my apartment. It was Cicero who coined that phrase. I should have known. She graduated from an academy named after him, and she’s big on meaningful inside references, just like her old man.
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