Read more: For Dad – Remembering Humble Habits of Humanity

Sun spills across the porch in wide, welcoming rays. Luke Combs croons through the speaker (his new album, “The Way I Am” is a work of art, as everything he releases is). The song, “Forever Mine” carries an older tune. Folksy. A weathered country – reserved for slow, rural mornings and enduring love. Breakfast is made – Thomas’s best English Muffin – and Rosie, my English Springer Spaniel, sits at my feet. The outside apartment complex hums in a tune that is not quiet silence or sound, but quiet energy. Soft energy. One that feels as comfortable as an new cotton pair of lounge shorts.

It is a morning that all feels very lived in, very mine.

It is also a morning that reminds me of my father.

My experience with loss is not a new topic here. I wear my losses proudly as I emerge on the brighter, healed side of them. But a scar – no matter how well adjusted – stirs from time to time. Not as an itch or an ache, but as the everyday echo of who someone was.

I don’t speak about my dad much. Not like I do my sister, who remains my deepest and most transformative loss. By the time dad passed, our relationship had changed. I had changed. Due to his illness, I had to grieve him while he was still alive because the dad I knew didn’t live in his eyes anymore, his smile. I had to pick up pieces he left laying around; assume duties that I always attributed to him. Resentment and duty combined, and I couldn’t remember the best parts of him for the longest time. I certainly couldn’t articulate what he meant to me before he was sick, which is one of the more infuriating facets of chronic illnesses that destroy personalities – the worst memories are the freshest, and thus, more potent than the fun, formative ones.

But now, they return. Crawling back in their own time, as I sit at my dining room table gazing out at that morning sun. I think: Dad is here.

Dad is present in the sun that spills across the flowers and herbs I planted yesterday evening, as he loved to garden and was so incredibly skilled at it. He lives in the twang of aged country music, as he was a closeted fan who stealthily listened to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers in his car on morning work drives. He especially lives in that English muffin – his staple work morning breakfast, oft complimented by peanut butter. He even lives in Rosie because my father adored spaniels. He is here and, with him, are the mundane memories of who he truly was that were buried beneath time, difficulty, and loss.

That is the hook here. Eventually you reach a point in your healing journey where you remember what truly matters about a person. It is not the fun Disney vacations, or sweeping grand gestures, or the terse conversations – it’s the everyday habits and loves that made a person yours while they were being so completely themselves.

I don’t look for my dad in things. I don’t see him on long walks, or in people. But I feel him in the everyday movements. Pouring coffee, buttering bread, attaching  Rosie’s leash – these are all remnants of who he was and what he left for me.

Not words. Not actions. But in humble habits of humanity.

I hope one day my kids will think the same. That they will see me as someone whose presence echoed through their lives in small ways. In the way I always douse my coffee in too much creamer and can’t finish I; and  ow I laugh aloud at small, benign thoughts no else is privy to. Even in how I butter that old, dry English muffin that is perpetually on sale (always BOGO).

Grief is not linear. Healing is less so. But one day, you will sit at your table, content with your breakfast, and smile at the life you’ve built after picking up the pieces loss left for you. You will see your life and yourself differently. But you will see those who left you clearly. Not as though they never left, but as who they truly were: inexplicably human.

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