i NEED a CAT

[3-min read] I think my dad might be a gnat. It’s sitting on the upper right corner of my laptop screen as I type this, flicking its gnat wings and scrubbing together its rear gnat legs. It’s also keeping me company. (I don’t have a cat.) A couple times, I’ve tried to smash it and once I tried to catch and release it outdoors, but so far, it’s alluded me. My husband tried to kill it this morning and was unsuccessful, as well.

The lifespan of a gnat is only a week or two and my dad has been lurking in gnat form for over a week now. (I concluded that his spirit was “lurking” after I read a Facebook post of my half-sister’s.) I consider it a point of evidence that it’s my dad. Further evidence came from Spare. In the epilogue of his memoir, Prince Harry implied that a hummingbird inside his home may have been a visit from his “granny,” Queen Elizabeth, who had recently passed away. (Harry’s granny was The Queen, so she’s a hummingbird. My dad was a Buddhist and musician but also an opioids addict, so he’s a gnat.)

Actually, I haven’t been able to confirm my dad’s passing. However, there have been several coincidences. In August, I coincidentally read a second Facebook post by my sister in which she wrote that it was the one-year anniversary since she received the news that our dad was likely dead. I immediately called my stepmom (who divorced my dad decades ago) and asked her if there was any physical confirmation. She told me no, but that she could feel my dad was gone.

Recently, I coincidentally read a section in the book Hear Yourself: How to Find Peace in a Noisy World, by Prem Rawat, about “when our loved ones die.” In the moment, I didn’t think that section applied to me because I hadn’t read my sister’s posts yet. Also, I didn’t love my dad.

I only knew my dad a little; I didn’t grow up living with him. For seventh grade, I lived in California with my stepmom, my two half-sisters, and my dad after spending the previous three summers there. Since then, I’d only seen my dad a handful of times. He had reached out to me, mostly in letters, during his sober days and had typically been generous with praise for whatever I was up to. But he hadn’t been emotionally available to me. I know that a lot of folks, especially people my age and older, would describe their dads that way. But with mine, it wasn’t that he didn’t talk about his feelings. It was that he had done enough hard drugs from an early age (his teens) that his emotions were chemically blunted. The final time I saw him, in 2019, it was evident that he didn’t possess the emotional depth for an interactive relationship.

Coincidentally, what I would be working on this very moment if my gnat-dad wasn’t sitting on my screen—still watching me—is editing the last chapter of my memoir, in which I wrote about that final visit with my dad. Now, I’m wrangling with the decision of whether to let him watch me write about him in my memoir or watch me write to you about him in a blog post.

Blog post it is.

As I was reading about loved ones dying, I had the thought that I was lucky to not have lost a loved one during the height of the pandemic. Coincidentally, it’s suddenly apparent that while I didn’t lose a loved one, per se, I certainly lost a person of significance—much as I try to deny my dad that status. And now I’m grieving a little.

I’ve just looked up and the gnat is still there, still keeping me company as dad-gnat has been all this past week and through the draft of this essay. Of course I can’t kill him at this point. I guess he’ll just go when he’s seen enough of me.

I bought a journal to write down thoughts and reactions to prompts I found after googling “death of a father I never knew.” I’m not a journaler, but I’m (finally) enlightened enough to know that I would be better served if I respected my dad’s passing enough to take time to process it.

I’m getting oddly attached to the gnat, though. If gnat-dad flies away in the next moment, I might choke up. (I choked up as I typed that. Clearly, I have feelings I need to acknowledge.) Wait—another gnat just flew past and landed on the rim of my latte mug. Who the heck could that be?