Things We Lost When Dad Died

Earlier that afternoon, we buried my father. Alone for the first time in days, I washed his glasses in the kitchen sink with bright orange dish soap. My brother said a few times during the previous two days that he wanted this part over with—the visitation, the funeral. I didn’t. I wanted to stay in this grief bubble where the pain was immediate, but we were together in the hell of the matter. It was Monday, and when Tuesday came, my husband, Julio, would fly back to Colorado. My grandparents would go home to Indianapolis. We were expected to resume normal life, and I thought the hard part would really begin. Dad had not even been gone a week.

At some point the day before, I noticed that Dad’s glasses were still on the passthrough between the family room and the kitchen sink, tucked between a vase and the wall. They were the glasses he died wearing, but not his favorite pair, and dried vomit was smeared across the lenses from when paramedics tried to revive him. 

After the visitation, the house filled with people. Mom’s friends descended on us like good fairies bringing food, over-the-counter sleeping aids, and bottles of red wine. Between them, Mom’s coworkers, and family, the kitchen was a hub of conversation, cheesy potatoes, and alcohol. It made me uncomfortable that Dad’s glasses were lost in the chaos. I needed to take care of them but had to wait until there weren’t people everywhere. 

After the funeral, after everyone went home or to sleep, I cleaned the kitchen and carefully washed Dad’s glasses. It was not quite that I felt like Dad’s soul could not rest until his glasses were clean, but it did not seem right that we buried him while his barf lingered, forgotten. I dried the glasses and put them on a shelf in Dad’s office. Resting my hand on them for a moment, I whispered, “I love you,” and I went to bed. 

***

Dad went for a bike ride, came home, showered, sat down on the couch, and suffered the heart attack that killed him immediately. Afterward, the remainder of our family had to manage everything from magazine subscriptions to burial plots. It wouldn’t be fair to say that his things were in disarray. They just weren’t in an order that we knew. Some questions were immediate and pressing—where is the life insurance policy? Will Mom get to keep the house? Would our little sister be okay? And some questions lingered. For example, where was Dad’s gun?

The issue grew bigger the longer our uncertainty lasted, and it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Night We All Had Grippe.” Jackson treats the narrative as a puzzle for the reader and follows her family through a sleepless night as they change beds and bedrooms, trying to get comfortable when multiple children were sick. During the shuffling, the baby’s blanket went missing and was never seen again. Jackson writes, “We are none of us…capable of solving the puzzles we work up for ourselves in the oddly diffuse patterns of our several lives…” In a household of people living around and on top of each other, belongings and emotions get tossed together or misplaced. So, where was Dad’s gun?

Not long before he died, Dad told some of us that he bought a handgun and others that he had not. He told my brother that he purchased a gun from a friend to help him financially. Indiana has lax gun laws. He told Mom that he was concerned about recent violent incidents near the radio station where he was the morning host, driving to work in the dark. He told me that he bought a gun but no ammunition. None of these clues made sense, and together they made us wonder if the gun even existed.

In the days immediately after Dad died, my brother, Josh, and I tried to find the gun and the life insurance policy. As we rummaged through our father’s belongings, I worried fleetingly that we might find something that we did not want to see: evidence of an affair, dirty magazines, or other secrets that Dad did not want us to know and that we would feel embarrassed to find. Instead, we uncovered treasures from our childhoods—pictures and art projects tucked into drawers and file folders. Dad rarely said “I love you,” and was often hard on us, so perhaps these keepsakes conveyed a message that he struggled to speak. Ultimately, there were no big secrets, just misplaced documents. And maybe the gun.

We opened the fire safe to look for the insurance policy. Frustrated, we found an old disk with my writing from high school, savings bonds for our sister, a couple of Josh’s report cards, and a packet of $2 bills, including two with the Easter Bunny’s face instead of Thomas Jefferson’s. “Why are these here?” Josh asked, then studied his report cards. “Why did I do so bad in pre-calc?”

“It’s pre-calc, Joshua, a B is not doing badly,” I replied. “This is like a parting joke. Our inscrutable father, inscrutable in death.” We had hours of searching ahead of us, but thank God those $2 bills were safe.

The day after the funeral, I finally discovered the insurance policy in a stack of papers on top of a rarely-used filing cabinet in the backroom Dad used as a recording studio. 

But where was the gun?

Did he even have one?

The week after the funeral, we had to sell Dad’s midlife—end-of-life—sportscar and return the other car he drove as part of an advertising agreement with a local dealership. We checked, double-checked, triple-checked the vehicles. It would be a nightmare to unload them with the gun under a seat. We took everything out of the cars. No gun. I started to worry about that Chekhov principle. 

With a teenager at home and a grandchild soon to be crawling, Mom could not let this issue linger forever. As we sorted through our tasks and grief in a group chat, the question surfaced repeatedly. It was an urgent, nagging mystery. 

Six weeks later, Mom took Dad’s clothes out of the closet and found the gun stored in a nondescript black hardshell box that looked so much like the fire safe that it blended into the shadows under the shelf where both sat. The gun waited anticlimactically, unloaded, in a closet. 

***

In Catholic tradition, if you lose something, you can pray for the assistance of St. Anthony, Finder of Lost Articles to find it: “Tony, Tony, look around. Something’s lost and can’t be found.” After Dad converted to Catholicism, he developed a bit of a devotion to St. Anthony. It surprised me because he was usually a skeptic, curious and logical. Whenever things went missing, however, Dad was sure that St. Anthony would help. Not always right away, he insisted, but the item would eventually appear. “See! It always works!” Dad exclaimed, like simply finding the object—after searching for it—was proof of saintly intervention. Often, I wondered where St. Anthony had been my whole childhood. I remembered times when I frantically looked for whatever important belonging I lost before my angry father tore up my room. When Dad found St. Anthony, searching for things got much less stressful—at least for him. Losing something still makes me irrationally angry, whether or not I ask Tony for help. 

Once, Josh lost his wallet, stuffed with cash and checks from his high school graduation party. For years afterward, Dad would explain how, after he looked all over Josh’s room, he sat down on the bed to think and pray, and a few moments later, he just knew that the wallet was in the bed. With very little effort, Dad found it snuggled in the tousled bedsheets. “St. Anthony always comes through!”

A few months after Dad died, I started finding lost articles. Little objects I had long given up on suddenly appeared. A cooler my grandmother loaned me. A shirt I was not sure if I had kept or donated. At first, I thought nothing of it, but eventually, it started to feel like a prank—like Dad and Tony had teamed up. One morning, I reached to get a pen that I dropped between my nightstand and the bed and saw the dog’s vaccine tag sitting on the toe of my slipper, under and behind the nightstand, as though placed there intentionally, waiting. It had been missing for over a year, so I was relieved to see it, but I had no idea how it got there. 

***

After Mom found Dad’s gun, another puzzle remained unsolved: where was his driver’s license? It wasn’t in his wallet. It wasn’t on his desk. Perhaps the EMTs took it when they took his body? If they had it, wouldn’t the funeral home have returned it to us? Julio suggested that maybe it was in a saddlebag on Dad’s bike. When he went for a ride that morning, maybe he took it in case of emergency. The saddlebag was empty. Then, maybe he put it in a pocket on his cycling jersey? But Mom did the laundry and did not find it then either.

At first, every few months, Mom mentioned that not knowing what happened to the license nagged at her. Years later, it has never turned up. Maybe an EMT took it as a souvenir? It sounds twisted and unlikely when I suggest it, but people do weird shit like that, counting on no one noticing. Seriously, where is his driver’s license?

***

In the aftermath of Dad’s death, Mom preplanned her funeral and started going through her own belongings. Although I understood the impulse, it made me uncomfortable. I hoped her actions were premature by decades. Someday, Mom may sell the house, so she gradually cleaned out the garage and the attic, sending my brother and me our childhood paraphernalia. 

Four years after Dad died, I took my two-year-old daughter to visit Mom. My bedroom has become a guest room, and the dresser stores the fabulous sweaters Mom accumulated as a teacher in the 1990s. I looked for an empty drawer to use and discovered that the small top compartments still had junk in them—old CDs, socks, and random pieces of art projects. I should have dealt with them years earlier when I moved away. In the clutter, I found a kindergarten craft—four little pinecones of ascending height glued to a strip of wood. Each pinecone has a nut glued to the top to create a head, and the tallest has an extra half of a shell, resembling a bike helmet. “Butcher Family 1991” was inscribed on the wood in perfect teacher handwriting. I remember feeling proud of the bike helmet when I gave the project to Dad, and happy that it sat in his office for the rest of his life. Carefully, I packed the pinecone family to take back with me. 

In those days when we searched for insurance documents and handguns, every small item carried weight, like a relic or a piece of the puzzle that was Dad. We found notepads on which he tracked goals and drafted jokes for his show, scrolled through logs of his bike rides, and laughed as we sorted through decades’ worth of fashion-forward shirts. My impulse was to keep everything, to create a Museum of Dad, finding reassurance in the illusion of proximity belongings create. I had to stop myself, keeping only what I could treasure. We lost so much when Dad died. No trinket fills that absence, but sometimes they provide reassurance, an echo of who we lost and the things left unsaid. As I unpacked from my visit home, I showed my husband the pinecone family. He chuckled, admiring the helmet. “It’s silly; I know,” I said. “But he must have liked it because he kept it all those years.” A clue, hiding there in plain sight.

Photo by Jadon Barnes on Unsplash.