Love, Dad

20. Love, Dad

He let me go alone. It wasn't anything that I necessarily needed to do on my own, but somehow Levi always felt like it was appropriate to give me five or ten minutes by myself before he joining. With a smile I looked back at him and waved, continuing on my way down the lonely, quiet path until I found dad just where I'd left him. Last tombstone in the third row. The flowers I brought him didn't seem like they were enough, but I figured they would do as I cleared away the dead ones I'd left last week. Dad never really was one for flowers, but it was the only thing I could give him now that he was buried in the earth.

"You never could keep your face clean," I scoffed lightly to myself as I wiped the stone and sat down next to him. It had been a while since he had passed, and I'd made sure that I'd come to see him at least every week. In the beginning, when it was the worst, I came almost every day, and I'd stay for hours. There was no way I would've made if Levi hadn't been there to get me through it. I'd known it was coming, I had mentally prepared myself for it—or so I had thought. But it was so much harder when it actually came time, and it took everything I had not to want to crawl into the hole after him.

"Caiti said she came to see you today, but I don't know if she told you she was leaving." It saddened me that I had to be the one who broke it to him. But there were no secrets between us now. I'd told him everything that had happened in my life, and this was no exception. I could hear him in my head, telling me to go be with her today, but I wouldn't miss seeing him just because one of my greatest friends was leaving. It was her choice, of course, yet I still wished that she would reconsider, remain here with her family. It was ironic, the way I watched the scene play out, knowing that it was me this time standing in my father's shoes. Even now, as hard as it was, I knew that I didn't have the requisite tools to grasp how difficult it must've been for him.

Yet it didn't change a thing. Yes, it was her choice, and we'd all been allowed to make our own. I regretted mine, really. There were so many things I wished I could've done differently, but I had to live with them the way they were. In the back of my mind I constantly found myself wondering if I'd ever really forgive myself for leaving. It was by my own hand that I wasted those precious five years—the last that he had. More time, that was what I always said I wanted, more time, and I could've had it if I hadn't decided to go about my life the way that I did. He said he forgave me for all that, and I hoped that he truly did. I'd do just about anything to have those five years with him now.

"Hey, dad." Levi appeared behind me, placing his own arrangement on my father's grave before lowering himself beside me with a gentle kiss. It was chagrining, but it was also aweing that he still treated me so fragile sometimes. I was happy that he cared so much, that he had let me break and mourn as he did, but I also wished he understood that I was okay. Okay as I could be for how things were. Dad had died, and that was hard, but it didn't take me long to realize that he was no longer in pain, that he had gone to a better place—a place with pearly gates and streets of gold. A place where people fly free.

For that reason, I was certain he wasn't here at his grave when I came to visit—he never was one for lingering among the dead anyways. Though he was someplace else, I still came because it was the closest I could get. I wasn't able to follow him where he went—not right now at least—and I still felt comforted by being here. In my own way, I hoped that he could still hear everything that I said to him, that he still watched over me from whatever cloud he was floating on. Then at least he would know all those things that I had not been brave enough to tell him in life.

I wasn't the only one who'd been robbed in my cowardice, but Levi too. He never got the chance to truly be my father's son, not in the way he could've been. The way he was now. It hadn't been too long after I started coming to dad's grave that I told him the truth, and I longed for him to still be here with me. He'd missed so many things already in just the short while that he'd been gone. Our wedding for one—small but intimate, proving that we had a lot more allies in this small town than I ever would have thought. Levi was finally my husband, and I couldn't help but to feel like dad blessed our marriage from where he was.