Five Years Without a Sky Above Me

My father died five years ago yesterday, on January 5, 2015. His death was sudden—I’d spoken to him the day before, and I’d had emails from him that morning. My brother talked to him that evening as our dad decided to go to the hospital because of some abdominal pain. Dad arrested in the hospital as the ER staff prepared to treat a blockage. He could not be revived.

And without warning, I became the executor of both Dad’s and Mother’s estates (she had predeceased him six months earlier after suffering from Alzheimer’s for years). My world tilted on its axis.

A friend told me when my father died that when the second parent dies, “there’s only sky above you,” meaning there is no longer anyone who has known you forever, no one to provide familial lore and wisdom or to connect you to the past. And so it has been. Five years without my parents. Five years with no one above me.

I still drive my dad’s car, which I bought from his estate to replace my older model of the same vehicle. I have my parents’ old clock, which I wind weekly as my father did. I have some of my mother’s Hummel collection on the shelf in my new house, and I have a crystal Nativity set I gave them. This Christmas I found many ornaments that made me smile as I decorated our tree—ornaments my parents had given me or I’d given them and reclaimed after they died.

I still talk to my parents frequently, particularly to my father as I drive around town in his car. I know he would want me to wash it more often than I do. But, hey, it’s my car now. He can’t dictate what I do with it, only that I still feel close to him as I drive it.

Sometimes when I talk to them, my parents even answer me. I know they are fine. I know they are still proud of me.

But when a question pops up about family history, there is no one to ask. What town in Ireland did my mother’s relatives come from? I think I remember what she told me before my daughter and I traveled to Ireland, but I can’t be certain. Why did my father’s parents move from Klamath Falls, Oregon, to the Seattle area? I think it was because of my grandfather’s job, but I really don’t know, and now I never will.

And when I want to complain about something my husband or adult children did, something I don’t agree with, there’s no one to help me put their actions in perspective, no one who knows me and my reactions as well as I know myself. No sky above me, indeed.

I’ve mostly grown used to feeling that some vital part of me is missing, that there are gaps in my history that can never be closed. I grieve the loss of my parents, but I’ve mostly come to terms with their absence.

But I still want to fill the gaps for the generation that comes after me. Unfortunately, my kids don’t seem to have the same sense of needing their histories completed. There’s still time for them, there’s still sky above them. I write this blog for the time when I will be gone, for the time when they want their sky above them.

What do you miss most about people you have lost?