Traces of Echoes

Today, I was pretty active on Twitter and BlueSky. I even responded to a few posts on LinkedIn, which I assume makes me a productive member of society, or at least someone willing to publicly argue with strangers while pretending it’s networking. But somewhere between the political hot takes and the inevitable scrolling doom, my mind drifted to death—not in a "stare into the void" way, but in that casual "let’s run an inventory of all the dead people I’ve known" way. Fun.

I’m convinced I’ll live forever. Not in a vampire or billionaire-tech-guy-buying-immortality kind of way, but in the way that makes me feel like I’ve got an infinite amount of time to get my act together. Time stretches out in front of me like a hallway with no end, and yet, I keep stumbling over the ghosts behind me.

The first funeral I attended, I was five or six. My dad took me up to the casket, pointed at his stepfather’s corpse, and said, "Look how peaceful he looks." He did not look peaceful. He looked like an old man who had been forcibly introduced to a suit one last time. Death had not granted him the courtesy of looking asleep, but I nodded along anyway. That was my first lesson in how people lie to comfort themselves.

Then there was Susan. My dad dated her. She was kind to me, which was rare because most of my dad’s girlfriends saw me as an inconvenience at best, a financial warning sign at worst. When my dad found out she had passed, he broke down. I broke down, too. Maybe because she had been kind, or maybe because my dad was in pain, and I didn’t know what else to do. I remember saying, "Take me instead." Real dramatic. My dad got mad. I get it now. No parent wants to hear that, even if they don’t know how to say why.

Years passed before the next death. Byron. Air Force buddy. Rode motorcycles together. He was reckless. So was I. The night before he died, he came by to buy a muffler off the bike that I crashed a few days earlier. I told him to be careful after narrowly escaping the clutches of death myself. He laughed it off. The next day, death took home a friend. The memorial was that weekend. I cried harder than I expected. Mostly because I realized it could’ve been me. Looking back on it, it was selfish to think that. 

Then came my stepmom. Linda. We had a complicated relationship. I think she loved me, and I think she resented me, and those two things don’t always cancel each other out. When she died, I felt… nothing. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe I felt the weight of responsibility pressing down harder, knowing my dad was going to need help. Either way, I didn’t have time to process it properly. So I didn’t.

Then my dad.

He moved back to Vegas after Mom died, decided he wanted to "settle down"—which is a generous way of saying he had no real plan and was hoping we’d figure it out together. He asked to stay with me. I said yes because no matter how complicated things were between the both of us, I was never going to say no.

It didn’t work. He felt like a burden. I never said he was, but he saw it in my exhaustion, in the way I struggled to keep my own life together. One day, after I took some time to be by myself to try and figure things out, he packed his bags and left when I returned home from work in the morning. He couldn’t even look me in the eye. I don’t remember if he said he loved me. That was the last time I saw him alive.

We talked on and off for almost a year. Then one day, he sent me a text: "Call 911 for me. Emergency." I frantically tried to call him back, for almost an hour trying to get his phone to pick up. I called my brothers, but neither seemed worried or bothered. A week later, after speaking with him off and on, he decided that 911 wasn’t necessary. A VA parking lot. A Ford Taurus. A bullet. My brothers didn’t help. One refused to house him. The other claimed he offered, but I don’t believe it. I told my dad he could come back. I told him we’d figure it out. But it was too late. He probably thought it was better to have a bullet than to be a burden. The worst part is, I think all of this is true, and the sadder part is I’m not sure if these events are what even happened anymore. Memory has a way of smoothing out the edges, cutting pieces away until what remains is something manageable. I hold onto the resentment toward my brothers, but in truth, I still hate myself for what happened and hold them just as responsible.

Four years later, Charles. One of my best friends. The guy who helped me get through my father’s death and helped me move to Chicago. In his prophetic nature, he told me I’d meet my wife there. Sonofabitch was right. He was one of the best people I knew. Damn good man. And then his heart failed him. I wish I had been a better friend to him. His passing still hurts the most. Damn good man.

Before I finish this long introspective rant, there was my dad’s funeral. The final joke. And it’s always where my mind goes when I think of death. My oldest brother, soaked in guilt, took over. Arranged for the service to be at his church. A Black church. The same kind of people my dad had spent years badmouthing behind closed doors. Thanks, Southern Strategy!

I sat in the pew, listening to a pastor read out the wrong birthday, a wildly inaccurate list of accomplishments, all while my dad’s old acting headshot sat on display with that shit-eating grin. The church was kind enough to also cater, and it had the most fitting thing for food—fried chicken and watermelon. It was the best fried chicken I’ve ever had. All of it was poetic. It was ridiculous. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to cry. I did both. I knew he would be angry, and somehow that made me laugh.

I miss him. And I don’t. And I do.

We would’ve fought every day about politics. He would’ve hated everything I stand for now. And maybe I would’ve fought harder to make him understand. Or maybe not. Maybe this was always where we were headed. No, I would've fought hard for him to understand, and I know I would hear his classic, "You're right son. You're always right."

I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I did, I think he’d haunt me just for the arguments. Maybe that’s the real afterlife: an eternal debate where neither of us backs down. Maybe that’s the only way we’d ever have really understood each other.

And maybe that’s why, some nights, when no one’s around, I still talk to him. Not in a crazy way, just in the way someone talks to a ghost they know isn’t really there, but still listens anyway.