10/18/2022
10.18.19 to 10.18.22
Three has always been a magical number. 33 is our lucky number–you had a Rams jersey with 33 on it, and now I have 33 tattooed on my arm in your handwriting. And here it is, three years since you had to go—no, three years since you got to leave the body that had been ravaged by so much distress and disease.
It always seemed fitting, too, that you would go in October because it’s my favorite month and your favorite month. You are forever in October now, always on the back of the horse, riding in the mountains that are painted with colors as vibrant as you were.
I always suspected this would be the last anniversary I would write about your passing, always knew that three, being the number it is, was a salve that would ease the aches, a lucky charm that would change the grief to a celebration of the life you lived. Or maybe I believed that, somehow, it would mean you were coming back.
But you’ve actually been here all this time. I’ve seen you three times (coincidence? No. Magic.) in the universe where you exist, and while there are skeptics and critics that say we cannot see or hear or feel those who have passed on, I know what I saw. I heard what you said to me. I felt your presence.
“Dad, what are you doing here?”
“I’m just watching over you.”
But I haven’t really stopped writing about my grief. As with all experiences, good and bad, my past influences the words I put on the page. As writers do, of course. I have three books (there’s that number again) coming out soon, Dad, and I know I wouldn’t need a marketer if you were still here because you’d shout about it from Heber to every corner of the world.
In the second book of my series, my young heroine has watched her father go from young and healthy to nearly incapacitated by a sickness no one understands or can cure. Did I draw this scene from our last years of life together? Who’s to say. Writers are complicated artists.
I suppose I don’t really know if this is the last thing I’ll ever write about or for you, Dad, but these words will have to do for now; these words will have to serve as the story you never got to finish writing. These words are a gift to you. Happy three years of being cancer-free, Dad.
Dad and I walk through the Wildwood now, my arm tucked into his to support his body that is bowed like a rainbow from fighting against the wolf inside him. He can’t stop accidentally changing into a wolf. He is a captive caged not by four walls but by his own body. His homesickness.
People who ask about him are told he has cancer; in a way, it’s the truth. There is something inside of him eating away at his very essence.
Dad’s eyes are still young; his smile is still roguish. But he is fading like the moonlight does when the sun, the mightier light, pushes its rays across the sky like an unwelcome savior from the darkness. He has become ash when he was once a bright, burning flame. My father, who aged, it seemed, overnight, holds out a shaking hand to me.
Dad wipes his other hand over his trembling lips. The movement, so weak and vulnerable, makes me close my eyes and push air into my lungs to prevent my chest from caving in. I lace Dad’s fingers with mine. We follow a path only I can see, now that I know to follow my heart rather than my eyes . . .
~from the forthcoming novel AnnaGrey and the Moon Throne published by Young Dragons Press. Copyright 2022 by Lindsay Flanagan.
Three has always been a magical number. 33 is our lucky number–you had a Rams jersey with 33 on it, and now I have 33 tattooed on my arm in your handwriting. And here it is, three years since…
