- Father's Day is upon us.
And I don't have a father.
I mean, I did have a father, but he died.
Every year for the rest of the time that I am alive,
I will have to confront Father's Day
and decide how I feel about it.
Like, am I sad?
Am I wistful?
Am I bitter?
Am I melancholy?
Sometimes I feel like I'm all of these things,
sometimes at once.
In honor of Father's Day, I have decided
to take a stroll down photo memory lane
and find some of the amazing things
that photos of me and my dad have stirred up for me.
This is a photo from 1976.
I was born in 1975, at the end of 1975.
So I'm a baby, I'm a tiny baby.
I'd say I'm about six months old.
You know, the things that I see
is that my dad's really young.
He's playing the harmonica.
And I grew up in a very musical household,
so I'm laughing, I'm clearly loving
that my dad is playing the harmonica for me.
And when I look at the way his hand is holding me,
that's the same hand that he had my whole life.
You know, I remember when he was dying,
his hand still looked like that.
This is a picture of me at about, I don't know,
four years old.
My dad is dipping me, my dad taught me to dance.
He would put on old music from the 50s
and he would teach me the dances
that he and my mom did when they were dating.
I loved dancing with my father,
and I just love this picture.
He looks really strong, and I'm really tiny.
This is a picture from June 1979,
so I'm four and my brother is eight,
and this must have been Father's Day,
because my dad's birthday is in December
and the only time that we would wake my dad in bed
was his birthday or Father's Day.
This is Father's Day 1979.
I look absolutely just tickled that I got to wake my father.
He looks not happy to be woken up,
but he always was happy to be woken up by us
on occasions like this.
This is a picture of me and my dad
on one of the many father-daughter road trips
that we took when I was a teenager.
I had just cut my hair off,
so this was right when Blossom ended.
This is my dad holding the camera out.
We're somewhere in the middle of America
with a weird, you know, like elk sculpture.
Yeah, my dad was a photographer
and I wonder what he would think of the selfie craze,
'cause this is how we took selfies back in the 90s.
This is one of my favorite pictures of me and my dad.
I'm in college and my mother called our name
at the same exact time.
And if you look very carefully,
we are turning at exactly the same angle.
We have the same exact body language,
our faces are making the same exact expression.
It's just an amazing picture to me.
I had my dad's body, and
it's just an amazing photo to me
of us literally doing the same thing physically.
Our eyebrows are raised the same way at my mom.
It's just an amazing,
amazing photo of DNA, really.
This photo is one that I'm not in.
It's an important aspect of the memories
that I have of my dad.
This is, this is my parents before I was conceived,
with my brother.
My brother's four years older than me,
so he's probably two in this picture.
You know, this photo holds memories of a time before I was,
when my brother was already having memories
and my parents had a whole life, you know, without me.
But I'm in this picture, too.
I'm waiting, I'm waiting in my mom's body
to become the child that was their second-born.
And my dad's really handsome in this picture,
and my mom is beautiful, and
this was them, you know, before me.
This was their us.
There's not an us anymore for me and my dad.
But these kinds of photos, these memories,
they're the ones that I hold in my brain and my heart,
and I get to keep those forever,
the same way I hope my boys will keep
the memories that they have of me as our us, forever.
So on this Father's Day, yes, I miss my father.
I also miss my father every day.
And the healing that we get to do
is made up of so many memories and so many photos and
so many images, so many dreams that we had,
and that we continue to have.
And our ability to heal is based on
not only what we remember, but also sometimes,
what we choose to forget.
Happy Father's Day to all of you,
and if you're missing your dad, you're not alone.
Please leave your comments below.
Tell me who your dad was.
Thank you for watching this video,
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I'll see you next time.