Once they’re gone you just think about what you’d do if they weren’t. I miss you, Dad, every day, and time has not made anything easier so much as clarified the absence.
It’s all hard. There are no easy days. You knew that. You told me so. Your Dad passed when you were too young and I’m much older and it’s still too damn young. Too damn young, cause you could be here, and you’re not ever going to be here again.
I’ve been upset about that. I’ve been upset generally. I’ve grown a decade in a year. Growing up is pretty good until you get to all the loss you’re going to have to experience. Then, with the way it’s changed you now, you’ll never get to share that version of you with the person you need to share it with.
You were unsettled and messy and anxious and sad a lot. Hid it under toughness. Taught me toughness. Showed me how to hide it. Thanks and also now I can feel anything and not hide and let it out and do the things you didn’t or wouldn’t do.
Now I can live in your honor and without fear or regret, knowing that I’m a good man because of you and an anxious man because of you and that multiple things can always be true, and I love you, and know that you’re never coming back.
The End of Oak Street is a dinosaur movie about grieving the life you had with your parents. David Robert Mitchell’s Dad also passed and he dedicated this movie to him and he made a movie about Dads and what gets left behind in a family.
The resonance of the movie — although critics have wrongly pointed to its meanness (what meanness?), and its darker dinosaur story than the fantastical kind that inspires awe at the cinema — is that it’s a family story.
Dinosaurs and scifi are just a template. What works is the vibe and the time period and the sense of wonder and the nostalgic deep pang of regret. It’s about seeing with clear eyes that our parents did their best even when it was bad and even when they had no control of absurd circumstances.
If they sucked at it a bit it’s because we all suck at it. They did their best and we’re doing our best and couldn’t we have one last talk and one last father-son moment, or is everything in the rearview mirror?
I talk to you still anyway. Writing about a movie like The End of Oak Street like this is kind of like talking to a parent who passed away. Watching the movie was also kind of like that, so I can imagine making it was kind of like that, too.
And it didn’t come with the pain I expected. Loss isn’t the sharp pain of defeat. And reflecting on it isn’t like that either. It’s more like the crushing sense of nothing there. The dead phone line. The house that’s still empty except your stuff. It’s having a Dad all the time and then never having a Dad again.
It will be okay. The way you were okay. In that it’s not okay. In that you weren’t okay. In that I’m not okay. But also in that everything is always okay in the end because it’s not the end — not really — it’s just the end of us having any kind of now.
We can always go back. We just can’t go forward anymore. But take me back now. I’ll do what is right going forward. Best as I can see it. I’ve got it from here, for you, for our family, for myself.
I love you, Dad. Let’s just go back.