Ranunculus

I feel an affinity toward you, Emily. The Myth, the Lady in White, the poet.

Some necessary research on your basic history led me to a site that claimed to hold your biography and I found myself enthralled by you. It is foremost the fact that you were content not to be published or seek to be widely read during your lifetime, that you wrote because it brought you joy. Secondly that you were often baking, and excelled at it. Thirdly that you tended to a garden that became greatly admired in Amherst. Well done, Emily.

Those reasons, and more: because you bravely wrote directly to a contributor of the Atlantic Monthly to inquire his opinion of your talents, and because of, later, the way you described yourself in a letter to Mr. Higginson. Because you were close with your family, that you became reclusive but not bitter, ill but not forlorn, not always. You are both morbid and dainty in your writing, capturing at once the marriage of a finite sense of life and a peculiar, eternal longevity, too. What I read from others and what I read from you seem to tell a story of a woman taunted by the deaths of those she loved, one whose reclusive nature did not yield anger but rather introspection and a curious sense of humor.

I admire that you do not hold true to a form in your style, that it is rumored you did strange things (like speak to people through doorways instead of face to face), that you requested your coffin be carried, not driven, through the buttercups to your gravesite. The very request embodies you; poetic, serene, and macabre.

To act other than what is normal in the pursuit

It's that glee which suddenly and irrelevantly escapes one's mouth, in the form of a toothy grin and sparkling eyes, upon realizing people will come to this thing you have built. I must now learn to trust myself, or try to, for I am still unsettled by the sheer imagination this project possesses. And yet, I reach out and touch it and I know it is real.

Because I am living proof that a wild-caught hare of a dream can really, actually become true, so now you must believe in yours. And so, I carry on with this.

And so.

You and I, Dad.

Together we built that napkin holder for Mom. I drew penciled hearts along the side of it and you smiled and drank coffee from your travel mug. Is that the memory I want to remember?

When did I think your accident would be easy? I supposed that you would physically return home and your brain was elastic enough to bounce back to its former being because you are my dad and you can do anything. You could do anything.

You could do anything. 

And now, I realize that you were broken on June 6, 2002. All those years ago, your brain was injured and a big part of it was taken away and you are different. I thought that essay I penned in college fixed it, Dad. I thought when I put those words on a piece of paper and it was published in a magazine, that I could put it on a shelf and store it away and allow your brain injury to become a dusty memory we  could all ignore. 

I thought I'd dealt with this and that I knew what to expect. But the partial death of the fatherly figure I knew is something I am only just learning how to cope with. Because now Mom is aging and you do not have the skills to care for her. 

Because now you are doing illogical things that makes us all wonder where you went. You bring home ammunition and tell us to prepare for an apocalypse and to buy seeds; many, many seeds. 

Mom has told me that she will need you to sign the house over to her name because of the likelihood of Alzheimer's in the near future. 

And all I can think about is that damn napkin holder. You were my hero, Dad. And you are here, you are still here but I've lost the father of my childhood, of my best memories. 

And I never mourned him. And tonight I cry desperately, trying to grasp something that no longer exists in this life. I am trying to cup air in my hands. Even my deep breaths cannot satiate the desperation for oxygen, because there is not enough in this entire house to calm a broken heart. 

You did not teach me, Dad, how to be okay right now. I am going into a cold and silent adventure, blindly with our family as we try to help you understand what we cannot. I love you, Dad. Please do not forget me. Do not forget your little girl.

And I am so scared.