Nothing Heals Like Summer Rain … and 80s Adult Contemporary
Doing a summer dance with paternal grief.
Something unusual has been happening to me these past months of June and July. As I’ve been hitting new milestones of growth—publishing my first book, being creatively visible—I’m getting hit by tiny waves of grief about my father.
I’m reading Prozac Nation, a book I met serendipitously. It’s taking time to get through it because I read about four books at once, switching around to suit what the moment needs. You know?
Anyhow, back in June, I came across a beautifully written sentence in Prozac Nation about forgiving a dad that made lots of mistakes followed by a sentence about the desperate love for your father that never goes away.
I sobbed for 5 minutes then fell asleep.
Early June, I rediscovered a long-forgotten song by Patti Labelle called “New Attitude”—one of many songs my dad used to tape on VHS while the music video was on TV.
“She has the same birthday as you, Swee!” he’d say to me (short for sweetpea). We’d watch the music videos over and over again, dancing in the living room.
I gleefully shook around to “New Attitude” for the first time in decades while loading my dishwasher. The next moment, I felt a sudden urge to cry like a pesky, choking needle in my heart. It needed to get pulled out.
My number one choice to get emotion moving when it feels stuck? Music. And so I searched on Spotify for what might get the tears flowing as they needed.
“Angel” by Sarah McLachlan does the job. Yes, the sad dog commercial song. There’s nothing personal about it … in fact it’s the impersonal nature of this song that seems to work. It gives me the idea of my father needing to be held by an angel in a sad hotel room like a sick dog who needs to be adopted.
I cried. 5 minutes passed. It was over.
Fast-forward to a gray day in late June—the kind of summer Sunday that needs a sweatshirt. I feel like listening to Phil Collins while I drive in the rain. I play the song “Hold On My Heart” by Genesis and it happens again.
In this grief-struck moment, I miss my dad. I want to talk to him, so I try.
I say out loud:
Are you here?
I sit there, dumbfounded and speechless.
What do I say?
Then I realize I have nothing to say because I never knew how to talk to my dad.
We spoke in playfulness. Swimming at the pool. Riding bikes. At the park, he’d hit baseballs as far as he could off my 8-year-old girl’s pitch, and I’d run along to fetch each one.
We spoke in creativity. Singing in the car. We spoke in Madonna, Phil Collins, Gloria Estefan and Sade—Adult Contemporary of the 80s and 90s. We danced like wild things to “Sussudio” in the living room.
We spoke in bursts of panic and anger, too. In insults that burrowed deep under my skin. In awkward pleas for things I couldn’t believe he was asking me to give.
There wasn’t much of an in-between.
It’s now I realize why the song Angel coaxed the tears out of me that day—it’s a reverie for a human so covered up by addiction that you can’t see who they are. Not even because they won’t let you, but maybe because they don’t know.
As a child, I made fruitless attempts to figure out my father. I think I always sensed part of him was impossible to know.
I used to spy on him in the basement while he fiddled with his lottery receipts and his calculator. I rummaged through his dresser drawers to try and find what he was hiding. But it was nothing either of us could find in a drawer.
The last time I danced with my father was at my sister’s wedding in 2010—a memory that stays with me. The song was “Please Don’t Stop the Music” by Rihanna. He spun me around and whipped me back and forth in ways that surprised me because he’s the only person I’ve ever danced with who knew how to lead. He made me feel lighter than air.
During this summer of creative milestones, my father’s presence has been stronger. I get an inkling to hear a song and feel him right next to me. I don’t know why. Maybe my fruitful moment of creativity has magically carried the best parts of him forward.
Either way, that late June day in the car listening to Genesis speechless in the rain, I understood something for the first time: I don’t need to know how to talk to him.
I don’t need words to deal with these peculiar grief waves … the aftershocks caused by separating myself from a father because it was best for me, not because I didn’t love him.
Words never worked for us. We only ever spoke in music.
Maybe the next time I look for him, I’ll find him singing in the car where the best parts of us lived.
Maybe I’ll meet him dancing in my living room for eternity.
P.S. I published a book in July! You’ll find a link to order A Season for Everything on my website. A Season for Everything is a collection of essays that weaves nature’s symbols with the complexity of human life and emotion. If you’re interested in cultivating a richer relationship with your everyday life, check it out!
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