My Hardest Walk

There’s this song, “The Hardest Walk,” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s from the 1980’s movie Some Kind of Wonderful, a movie that high school me related to enough to watch it over 60 times. The song itself is a very good one. I never used to skip listening to it when it was on. I even had it ready to go when I would ask “Alexa, play…” But now? I can’t listen to it anymore now though.

I think it’s because I have an actual hardest walk of my own to take now. My therapist asked me what the most difficult time of day was for me and I knew immediately when it was:

It’s when I walk by my dad’s living room easy chair to head upstairs to my bedroom every night. I cry every time. I am finding it harder and harder to stop. I think maybe I don’t want to stop… the feeling or the crying.

August 4th, 2019 was the last night I passed that chair and the last time my father was still sitting there. The next morning we walked out into the living room and found him still in his chair, but he had died. He hadn’t even taken his sneakers off or got to put his pajamas on. We kept shaking him and yelling his name, my mother and I, but we both knew it was too late. I started screaming but no sound came out of my mouth. His hand was ice cold but I wouldn’t let go. My dog jumped up into my father’s lap and kissed him. Even he seemed to realize what had happened. My brother and his family raced over and I heard my nieces and nephew start to cry.

I don’t remember much after that. I try, but it is like I won’t let myself remember all of it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

When 10 - 10:30 pm rolls around, I start to feel sick to my stomach. I know what’s coming and I want it to be like it used to be every night. I want my dad to still be sitting there in his chair, alive and eating his nightly peanut butter and jelly toast, drinking his ice tea and lemonade.

But now, every night, when I walk past his chair, I start to cry because he’s really not there anymore and he never will be again. The pain gets worse every time I have to walk past the empty chair. It feels like the worst pain I’ve ever felt, the hardest walk I’ve ever had to take. I hate it, I truly do, but I don’t it to end. I don’t want the pain to go away. That pain keeps growing and I want to keep feeling it because it means that he was here, my dad. That he was important and special and I will never forget him or how much I love him and how much he loved me.

He was a practical and realistic man about life. I can imagine him telling me to knock it off, to move on while asking me “what’s wrong with you?” (Oh how I hated when he would ask me that.) He would remind me that he couldn’t live forever, that he had to go sometime.

But I was a difficult and very stubborn daughter. I didn’t listen to him when he was alive. And I still don’t listen to him now. I want him to have been able to live forever. I won’t knock it off. I won’t move on. Even if he always knew better.

I just can’t do what he’d want me to do. If I do it will mean I’m giving up on him, that I’m forgetting him. And I don’t want to. I can’t. I won’t stop taking that walk.