I am free

I was still a young adult when my father died. It’s something that even now, almost two decades later, I am still processing. Grief is strange like that, sure, they tell you the stages… but never how long you’re in them, or the intensity or how personal each stage can become. Nothing ever prepares you for loss, and it all becomes one big learning lesson. One day you've got a million things to say to someone and the next day they're gone and your words fall away, sunken by silence so deafening you wish you could just scream.

Death is filled with uncomfortable silences, no one knows what to say. Father's Day rolls around every year and I have to explain why it dampens my birthday every year now. My birthday almost always falls on Father's Day weekend, so its hard to celebrate myself without my Dad here to celebrate as well. So I find ways to celebrate him every day, every week, every month. This month in particular, pride month, I find myself screaming out with double the voice, I'm hanging on to memories of the sound of his voice to project them with my own. My Dad never got to leave the closet, I'm not sure if he ever even got one step out of the door. I knew, my Mom knew, a handful of others....but it wasn't common knowledge. I watched my Dad not just struggle with the weight of his Parkinson's diagnosis but also trying to understand and define himself. He'd been married for almost two decades, he was a commanding officer in the military...he was a manly man! The toxic masculinity that drowned any hope he had of freedom ruled his mind. It made him afraid of himself as his body trembled and Parkinson's ravaged his body. He wasn't strong anymore. As if being queer, LGBTQIA+ in any way made him weaker, he just couldn't shoulder that weight anymore. His secrets went to the grave with him in some ways, burning along with him in the crematorium. I wished on every star that seemed to sparkle with hope that somehow he knew I loved him just the way he was. That his struggle inspired me not to shoulder that weight alone. I was allowed to be who I wanted to be and love who I wanted to love and I only wish he got that chance too.

I see representation in films, same sex couples holding hands on the street and wonder if my Dad can see them from the stars. If through my eyes he sees the progress we make every day, and through my trembling fear he can feel the terror of also watching the world regress at the same time. All that progress we've made since he died in 2005 being thrown down the drain by people who want to make America hateful again. I talk to my Dad all the time, as if I'm praying to some diety but really it's just the father I miss desperately. I tell him about how different the world is now, how even though sometimes it's scary to scream out who you are, there are more and more people screaming along with us. He was alive and aware when they threw the first brick at Stonewall, and I want him to know that we are still fighting and throwing those bricks. For the queers of today and those of the past. The ones just like my father who only dreamed of kissing a man on a public street, could see the pride parades and people living freely in their love. I hold tight to my wife's hand and kiss softly at her lips remembering the people who never got the same chance to marry their partners. I fight for him, because his battle was cut short. My Dad deserved to love and be loved for exactly who he was, and I will not let my voice be silenced so that his can continue to ring out with me, and when I meet him in the stars - a whole new generation will carry on crying out for us until the world yells along that love IS love.