Dear dad, five years later.

I bet you remember conversations like this:

“How deep is the water here, Dad?”

Every time we were near anything larger than a puddle, I’d eventually ask. At the beach. On ferries. Over bridges and in tunnels. As we spent the longest five minutes of my life parasailing.

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably 15 feet,” you’d say.

“Probably 20 or 30 feet.”

“Here? Pretty deep. Probably a couple hundred feet.”

How did you always seem to know everything? You could have told me anything and I think I would have believed it. It was one of my favorite things about you. We’d drive somewhere once and you’d know ten different ways back. It was a kind of practical magic.

Do you still know so much? I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about the omnipresent kind of afterlife. As a 20-something woman, I’ve said and done plenty my father need not worry about. But those reservations pale in comparison to the number moments I’d give my right arm to spend 15 minutes with you.

A lot has happened in the past five years. I recently moved to Maine. I actually drove up here about a month after you died. For the first few days and weeks after the accident, I couldn’t stand to be alone. But eventually, I needed to go somewhere. To somehow find you. In every picture I’d seen, Acadia and Mount Desert Island looked like the actual end of the Earth. Pine trees and jagged cliffs and then nothing but ocean. You always seemed lighter when we were near water. Where else could you have gone but the sea?

Now I live about 1,000 feet from the shore. It’s not exactly a beach — that’s on the other side of the peninsula, but you’d like it better over here. On most days, you can see straight across the bay and watch ships come in. I walked there tonight. The tide was so far out it was hard to imagine there was enough water to keep the sailboats afloat. How deep was it out there, Dad?

I still spend quite a bit of time wondering if you’d generally approve of my life so far. I think you would have understood my wanting to leave DC, just like I knew you understood why I wanted to be there so badly in the first place. I try to be a decent person. I recycle. I try to smile and make eye contact and not talk so fast. I try to keep things in perspective and not get too upset too quickly. Unfortunately, I do still leave my shoes around the house. What can I say? No one is perfect.

I don’t blame you, but I hate when you left me. We were getting to such a good place, you and me. I don’t think our relationship had ever been stronger. But that’s just it- we were only just getting to the best part. How could you have gone before I figured out what I was doing with my life? Didn’t you want to walk me down the aisle and hold my kids and continue to give me home and car repair advice for years to come? To tell me how deep the water was?

Of course, you did. I’m sure you wanted all that and more. To call us on our birthdays and round us up for holidays and to tell me to get my shoes out of the living room each time I came home. You worked hard for us and everything you had, and in what I hope was a fraction of an instant, it was gone.

People have a habit of sanctifying loved ones after they die. But you were already larger than life to me. There was no way for my grief to distort you into something more. You were something even more valuable, and tangible, than a hero; As I grew older and became less of a child you remained, unwaveringly, a parent.

Mom knew that, and in so many words, explained that it was why she gave me the news last. It was an extraordinary gift to be allowed to feel as though we were still of the same world, even if only for a few hours. I’m astonished that she had the presence of mind to make a decision like that in such chaos (I certainly wouldn’t have), but I’m even more grateful.

Losing you forced me to become more vulnerable and more aware. At the outset, those changes terrified me. I felt unspeakably exposed. But I’ve learned that vulnerability can also take the form of empathy. And awareness can, even if not as easily, help you to see good as well as the bad. The days after the accident were undoubtedly the darkest I’ve experienced, but what I remember most now were those who wrapped our family in love. To me, it is a gift to be able to empathize with others experiencing loss and true heartbreak. It’s still hard to naturally look for the good in any situation, but each time I do, I’m reminded of the healing it can bring. Your death was a cruel way to learn those lessons, but it would have been an even greater tragedy for me to have not grown from it at all.

That doesn’t make it easier to live life without you, Dad. Grief doesn’t go away, it only becomes something different. I’m trying to make the best of it. And if you can see anything from where you are, I hope it’s that. And it makes you proud.

Love, Your baby girl