- My dad and I would use to email each other every day from Monday to Friday.
- This tradition started when I went to live away from home and lasted for 35 years.
Each day that I don't write to Dad feels strange now. Emailing my father had been such a familiar part of my life, decades long, that its absence still feels like a missing limb. I keep reaching for it, although I know it's no longer there. The emptiness remains. I remember our correspondence like one remembers that limb.
For over 35 years, my dad and I wrote each other a daily email. Five days a week, Monday to Friday, skipping correspondence only when we were together visiting. We started this practice when I moved away, and it just stuck.
We would share news and advice
I have thousands of saved emails. The contents were not earth-shattering, mostly musings about our local weather forecasts, events of the day, and politics. Dad and I are both news junkies, and we often shared op-eds, although that just led to more grousing and complaining, which made my mother throw up her arms in disgust.
"You two," she would say. "It's a good thing you have each other because no one else wants to listen to your whining."
Dad and I were on the same page politically, so we weren't trying to convince each other of anything.
I often asked my father for financial advice, particularly after my divorce, when I was worried about my finances. He was wise that way, and I trusted his sage opinion. He wasn't ever pushy, though, and sometimes I did my own thing anyway. Then he might shake his head at me, but he had confidence in my judgment.
I knew this would eventually stop
Well aware of the fact that people age and things change, I knew that eventually, we'd have to stop writing. I remember the day we were no longer able to sail together because my father couldn't get safely in and out of the boat. But for some reason, I had convinced myself that Dad and I would write up until his last breath. While most of my friends lost both their parents years ago, I am a rare senior citizen with two living parents. Dad and I were able to email daily up through his 91st birthday.
But several months ago, my father fell and hit his head. I'd noticed he had become increasingly unsteady, even with a walker, yet was still unprepared. Seemingly overnight, my formerly curious and intellectually aware father had changed. Now in a wheelchair, my previously tech savvy dad can no longer use the computer. His short-term memory is impaired.
"Don't write to me anymore," he said one day, soon after the fall. I was taken aback. "Are you sure?" I asked, but I knew the answer. Dad could no longer manage the many steps required for computer usage and wasn't interested in dictation. Just like that, our decades-long correspondence was over.
In the scheme of what my dad has lost, losing daily emails with his daughter is small. But it had been such a significant part of our lives for so many years. I surprise myself that still, months later, I'll think about what I'd like to write. Yet I send nothing. Instead, I call Dad on FaceTime. When I see his face, cheerful and smiling, I don't notice the wheelchair. I ask how he's feeling and about the weather. We talk briefly about politics since he still reads the front page of the New York Times.
Although we no longer write, we can still connect, which was always the point anyway. Although we no longer write, I still let him know that I love him and think about him every day.