Anonymous

Photography by Morgan McCullen

If you’re reading this, let grief be the reminder of the love you shared.  

If you would have asked me three years ago to name the person that I never thought that I would lose, I would have told you about the man who was my hero. The man who taught me to walk, the man who taught me to ride a bike, who woke me up every morning screaming “Today is a beautiful day because of my beautiful girl.” He was the wisest and strongest man I knew. He was my rock. For every sports injury, for every tear shed from a broken heart to every celebration, he was right there. He was my everything and I never thought I would see the day that I lived without him.  

The day I came home from school, my senior year of high school, was the day I realized that I could lose my father. The day I realized his “headaches” were not just headaches but an inoperable brain tumor that had made its way to his spinal cord was the worst day of my life. I remember being so confused, I remember being angry, I remember praying that I would live the perfect life if my father would be spared. Over the next weeks and months, I watched the strongest man that I knew be broken down by a disease that he had no chance of winning but by God did he fight. Until my father’s very last breath surrounded by the rest of my family and me, he fought. He fought for us, but most importantly, he fought for himself and his life. He said to me “Do not ever let up, you are my daughter, and do not you ever forget it. I love you.”  

I did not listen to my father. For the next two years after that day, I fell into the deepest depression that I had ever experienced. I was completely and utterly lost without my father. I felt as if my entire world had been shifted upside down and that is because it was. My siblings and I no longer had a father, my mother no longer had a husband and partner, and his employees no longer had a boss. I tried my best to go on for my mother and siblings, but I found myself slipping deeper and deeper into the grief of losing my father until one day I felt as though the only way I could see him again was to end my own life. I could not go on living another day without him in my life. I thought of all the exciting moments that he would have been a part of, I thought of all the time I had with him, I thought if I could just see him one more time it would all be okay.  

What I could not conceive at that time was that my father never left me. Grief can be paralyzing and all-consuming but while those feelings are sad that that person is no longer here, it is also a sign of how loved you were by that person and how much you loved them. It is a sign that the time that you had with them was not wasted. My father was the person I loved most in this world and his death completely changed my life, but it changed it in ways that I never thought that it would. I learned that these feelings I was carrying were not temporary, I still miss my father and I would still do anything for another day with him but like my father said, “I am his daughter, and I don’t let up.” I choose to instead honor my father by doing what he did not get to do, by living. I honor him by living the life I was meant to live whatever that is and whatever comes with it. I choose to take the ups and the downs and believe that “Today is a beautiful day.”

Anonymous, University of South Carolina

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