Inheritance.

I cried today for the first time in a long while. I was lying on a massage table, face pressed into that little crescent pillow they give you, when the masseuse paused at my shoulders. She said, “You’ve stored a lot here.” Then she placed two warm Himalayan stones on my back. I closed my eyes, and I saw this memory of myself on a plane moving cities four years ago. Tears streamed down my face.

I have survived things in the last five years that I never imagined I could endure. A great heartbreak. A move across the country because my Dad was dying and I didn’t want him to die without me.

What made me tear up was seeing that girl on the plane who always kept trying. And for a moment I wondered if that’s how my Dad sees me now. Or how God sees me. (Which, I’ve learned, is none of my business.)

In 2021 I went through the hardest breakup of my life. Every day it hurt so much that I moved from LA to NY to be with my Dad for what would become the last two years of his life. Sometimes I still feel very ashamed that a relationship was my first choice, and my Dad became the second after it fell apart. When he saw me for the first time after I arrived, he didn’t say a word. Uncontrollable tears streamed down his face. I always knew he loved me, but that reaction just from seeing my face felt like a sacred moment between us. He knew I was broken. I knew he was dying. And somehow we met exactly where we both were.

I don’t know how you articulate a love like that.

My Dad and I talked every day in the hospital. He told me pieces of his childhood I had never heard. He told me about his parents whom I’ve never met. I learned that my grandmother was a fisherwoman who ran her own business at the market. I recognized parts of myself in her. I asked him what he regretted most in his life. Listening to his answers somehow restored and healed me.

When my sister called me to tell me that he died, I genuinely didn’t believe it was possible. I know, logically, that all humans die, but I was still stunned. I remember thinking: How do I go on after something like this, and how do I try to be a normal person again?

After many months, I journaled, and writing brought me back to my own humanity. I feel like I’m in a concert with everything in life when I write. During that time I wrote letters to myself, saying the things I knew that I needed to hear because no one was around to say them to me. Writing feels like the deepest prayer. It still does. I can say the truest thing, and I leave it on the page.

At the beginning of 2024, through journaling, I started to understand a painful but holy truth. The only life that I have been given the assignment to live is the one that exists without my Dad here. There is no amount of expectation for him to return, crying or therapy, that could bring him back. I used to let the pain of his death be bigger than the special moments that we had. He would never want me to live my whole life solely in response to his death because he wouldn’t want this devastating thing to seep too far into the identity of who I am or what I am becoming. He would want for it to maybe help me to understand the impermanence of all things, but that’s it.

There is only a version of me after his death.

This version makes me compassionate, empathetic, softer, more loving, and believes in the goodness of others which funny enough seems to be a truer version of me.

A week after he died, I visited a highly recommended medium because I didn’t know what else to do. My sister was sitting beside me, and the medium started to give me messages from him, things she couldn’t have known. She told my sister that he was grateful for her care while he was sick, that he never believed he deserved that level of care and love. She told us that if he gets to experience birth again, he hopes it will be into our family because he finally understands how much we loved him.

And then she told me something privately when my sister stepped out of the room.

She said his very last memory before death was of him teaching me to ride my bicycle at six years old. She described the exact pink bike with sparkles. She said he took off the training wheels and was terrified I would fall, but was also proud of me when I didn’t. She said it was his favorite memory of his whole life. She told me that he asked God to take him that night because he was in unbearable pain with his sickness.

I wondered what prayer was strong enough to bend the will of God.

The months after his death were a strange mix of destruction and creation. I moved to a city in Florida where I knew no one. I bought a home. I cooked, I wrote, I walked, I sang, and I danced with new friends. I rebuilt a life out of the pieces I didn’t recognize. At first, it felt wrong that I had to live through this alone in a new city. But eventually, it also felt right.

I learned something special during that time. The inheritance my father left me wasn’t material objects. It was the understanding of love — the kind that doesn’t end when a person ends. And also the kind that is all around me.

In Letters to a Young Poet, there is a line:
“...Believe in a love that is stored up for you like an inheritance.”

I used to think that meant romantic love arriving someday. Now I realize it refers to a tapestry stitched from every hard and holy thing you’ve lived through. The love that teaches you how enormous your own heart actually is. The love you discover when you finally lift your head from the obliterated place you’ve been through and look for something beautiful. The unconditional love that someone will get to experience one day when you love them from that sacred place.

I feel like I’ve typed all of my feelings here, so I’ll end it with this. There’s an old story from Indian mythology that I love. It goes like this… when a soul returns from its earthly life (when someone dies), all the angels gather around a celestial fire with excitement and curiosity. They ask:
Tell me what love felt like on earth.
Tell me about the pain and how it cleansed you.
Tell me what delighted your soul.
Tell me about trees and flowers and the miracle of touch.
Tell me… what was it like to hope?
And finally, “Tell me, what were the things that gave you goosebumps?”

Writing this to you gives me goosebumps.