It was a Tuesday night, my Dad had passed away the afternoon before, and I didn’t feel like telling anyone at the party that he had died. To be honest it wasn’t really even a party—it was, ironically enough, a wake for a friend’s restaurant that was closing down. We gathered to mourn what would soon be a culinary past, a flash in the greasy pan, as they say. She had laid out an assortment of food, delicious food, seemingly endless food that I ate with gusto, that I ate without shame. As only my boyfriend and I knew, I was grieving for two, so I felt justified yet slightly suspect for stuffing my face more than normal. Luckily I’m such a poor example of a vegetarian that no one even blinked as I binged on bacon sandwiches, gorged on what tasted like tofu french fries.
At one point in the night my boyfriend and I found ourselves in the basement of the restaurant, where a friend had brought us to show us the strangest bathroom I had ever seen. Both the toilet and the sink rested on pedestal stairs as if custom made for a very tiny emperor sometime circa Three’s Company. As we stood in the funny washroom she told me how she was leaving the next day for the coast where her grandma had just died. She told me that in response to what she was going through she went back and re-read the column I had wrote about the death of my grandma. It made me sad, and feel closer to her (both my friend and my grandma).
Later on that night my boyfriend told me that he had told her before we went down to the bathroom that my father had died. When I think about this now it makes every hug between her and I that night poignant and pregnant with obvious secrets. It feels right. It feels like family.
After our friend went back upstairs my boyfriend and I stayed in the basement, sat on the stairs facing forward taking turns resting our weary heads on each other’s shoulders. Sitting there we could hear someone on the phone explain that there was no reservation being taken that night and that tomorrow brought change. Everyone upstairs probably thought we were making out, but instead we were having the most intimate conversation we had had in months. We had been apart a lot over the summer and with fall coming and schedules beginning to settle down we were getting to know each other again. It was nice. We felt close to each other, and in that moment that was what I needed more than anything. I was feeling confused and conflicted about my emotions and reactions in light of my father’s passing.
Weeks before my father died I had gone away for the weekend with people from HIV Edmonton to co-facilitate an art workshop. It was an awesome experience where one night, after others had gone to bed and it was only us homos left listening to Leona Lewis songs while working on our art projects, I experienced a sweet feeling of male bonding I had never had with a group of gay men before. Contrary to the wandering mind it wasn’t sexual. It was funny and banal—a night of swapping stories and being comfortable in each other’s silences.
After I was back in Edmonton, and when it was clear that my father’s life was shorter than we thought it was going to be, a member of my family, knee-deep in their own confusion, guilt and grief accused me of caring more about people living with HIV than I did my own father.
What was said stung, but only because I had already considered it and was teetering towards being on the way to dealing with it. In the quiet moments during the weekend workshop, after I had spoken with my mother, I let myself feel the guilt of not being at my father’s side. I tried it on to see if it fit. And it didn’t. Out in rural Alberta, with shitty pop songs playing and country air circulating through shared quarters, was exactly where I was supposed to be. In dealing with the misplaced guilt I realized that it wasn’t about whom I cared for more—it wasn’t about more, or even caring. It was about what I knew and what I could do.
I knew how to take care of the people I shared the weekend with. We had shared pasts and flinches, common ground and coded language that we saw right through. It wasn’t that I loved them more than my Dad or even equal to my Dad. It was that I felt more comfortable with them. I knew how to let them in and I knew how to be there for them. I didn’t know how to talk to my Dad, and in the end I didn’t know how to take care of him. I tried my best by visiting him and being there as much as I could for my Mom and the rest of the family.
The last night of my friend’s restaurant, missing my Dad, feeling closer to my boyfriend than I had in a long time, my belly full and good friends around me I realized that if we are lucky—and I understand that I am lucky—all is family and there doesn’t have to be division. We are free to love.
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