Who's This?

My father

Me and my dad, probably 1982

I remember the first Father’s Day after my dad died. I felt weighed down by sadness. In looking back, it seemed like the air was thick with it. Almost as if I were back in Texas where June days are heavy and humid. I was in Oakland and the temperature was 70 degrees. It was a quiet day and it seemed like I was the only one out as I walked to the cafe to get a latte.

I hadn’t spent a Father’s Day with my dad in decades. When I went to visit, I went in the fall or spring, not in the middle of the summer. I would often send him chocolate chip cookies as a gift. He said they were the best cookies in the world. They were the only thing I knew how to bake.

Officially my father died of cancer, but he spent the last decade of his life with Alzheimer’s. During those last weeks, my mom said, “I lost your father a long time ago.”

For years, I would talk to my parents on Sunday afternoons. First, my mom and I would catch up, and then she would put my father on the phone. We had the same conversation each week, the same questions over and over, because he didn’t remember from one moment to the next.

This poem was inspired by those conversations. I found it last week when I was scrolling through an old folder of “B” poems, or “never going to see the light of day but for some reason I hang on to them” poems. I actually liked it when I read it again because it captures those Sunday afternoon phone calls and one of my favorite memories—Christmas Eve 1988 with my dad in Paris.

Who’s This?

Our conversations never long
even briefer now. Sundays in
the afternoon when mom hands
the phone across to you: "It’s

LeeAnn, do you want to say
something?” Who’s this? You start.
We play the game of not knowing who
before the weekly questions.

How’s your apartment? You’re
liking it? You’re close to the lake? 
Yes. Two blocks. Same as last 
week, last month, last year. Can 

you see it? No, not high enough. 
Though I speak of rounded treetops 
and gray morning skylines. But 
you’re liking it? I try to recall longer 

talks, if our questions ever led
to musings. We used to walk after 
lunch. When your knees were 
your own. Or in Paris, that morning, 

it was Christmas Eve while mom went
to have her hair done, we climbed 
to Montmartre, drank cappuccinos, 
and ate croissants. The words between 

us are gone. How’s work? you ask. 
Are they making you work hard? 
Oh I never work too hard. Answers 
you want to grasp but can’t before

they slip away. How’s work? I miss
the certainty within our silence. When 
we never had to play Who’s this? How’s 
your apartment? You’re liking it?

---

My father’s death felt very final that first father’s day after he died. I grieved him like it was the end of the world, and a friend who knew me and my whole history, wondered why given some of the things that he had said to me over the years.

The evening before he slipped into a coma and then died I leaned over to say goodnight. “I love you.”

“Really?” His voice was hoarse, hardly there anymore. But I could hear this: “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

I don’t know if my father ever really knew how much I loved him. Maybe he never trusted how much anybody loved him. And he died with that. I believe that’s why his death was so hard.

If you feel like reading more poems about fathers and daughters, I highly recommend these two lovely poems.

Goodbye, Daughters

Wing Man