I know, I know, using “The” as my “T” word is cheating. The first anniversary of my father’s death ended up hitting me pretty hard. So, I felt like it deserved its own post, albeit several months later.

March 22, 2024 was the first anniversary of my father’s death. I took the day off work, to be sentimental really, but it ended up being a very sad day so I was glad I didn’t have to work. The night before I watched the slideshow I had made for my father’s visitation and listened to the voicemails I had saved from him. I cried. On the 22nd, I took the kids to school, then took the baby to the cemetery with me. We prayed the rosary. Friday’s sorrowful mysteries seemed very fitting.

One aspect of my father’s death that had been weighing on me a lot at the time related to being a lawyer. I had been feeling like I was never going to be as good as he was at being a lawyer. I had even been told that by another attorney. Granted, the attorney who told me that is not someone I respect. So, while that one person’s comments didn’t get to me too much, the thought was still there, that I am not the lawyer he was.

I spent some time crying at his headstone, telling him I don’t think I will live up to his legacy in the legal field. Part of me is ok with that, because I don’t really want “lawyer” to be my legacy. Another part of me, though, is still such a people pleaser that I don’t want to disappoint anyone, including the people who expect me to be the lawyer my father was.

Obviously, my father and I are different people and the legal field has changed a lot since my father was in the prime of his career. He never had a smart phone. Email wasn’t a thing when he first started, and even at the end he only saw emails when he chose to open his laptop. As a result, I don’t think this job felt like a constant strain to him, quite the way it does to me sometimes. Also, he had a wife who stayed home with his two children. I have five children and a husband who also has a full-time job. The demands on me are quite different, so I don’t believe I should be held to the same standards as him. That being said, it is still hard to not compare myself to him and wonder if I will ever rise to his level.

That night I had to supervise a youth lock-in at our church, which is something I did two days after my father died last year. It was a fun experience, overall. We had wanted to show the kids a movie about Padre Pio that had come out fairly recently. Thankfully, none of them were interested. One of the other chaperones and myself watched it with the sound coming through her airpods while the priest played a card game with the kids in the same room as us, The movie was awful: story was hard to follow, nudity, language, and didn’t seem to show Padre Pio in the most favorable light. We had high hopes for it because it supposedly prompted Shia Labeouf to convert to Catholicism, but his conversion was not enough to salvage the movie. We were really glad we didn’t show it to the kids. Things just fall into place sometimes. I was coming into this lock-in with a bit more sleep than I had coming into it the previous year.

I talked to a friend from law school around the first anniversary of my father’s passing. Her father had died a couple years before my father. He died quite suddenly from a massive heart attack. I told her it was amazing to me the things that had been hard and how it was not always the things I expected. I thought the first Christmas would be terrible, but it wasn’t that bad. The first anniversary hadn’t even been on my radar and yet it knocked me out. She had just got married and I know not having her father at her wedding was tough. She said her birthday and his birthday are always hard too.

For me, my father’s birthday is only eight days after his death day. His birthday was the day before Easter, so my mother had family over to celebrate Easter on his actual birthday. I bought a small round cake and a bunch of candles. My mother and I lit sixty-four candles on that cake and had my brother’s kids and my kids blow out the candles. It was quite an experience. The candles created a torch of sorts and four little kids were trying really hard to blow it out. They succeeded, finally, but they were the only ones who wanted to eat a scorched cake they had spit on. I thought it was really cute and I’m sure my father would love that we involved his grandkids in that. I like that tradition and plan to keep it going each year, with the number of candles for the year my father would be turning.

Since my youngest daughter won’t have any memories of my father, I also plan to show her the slideshow I made enough that she does sort of end up having memories of my father.

Now father’s day is coming up. The second father’s day without my father. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to be as hard for me as it was last year, but who knows. It may still hit me like a ton of bricks. Last year I was out-of-town, but this year I will be home. This is one of the few weekends I don’t have stuff going on. So, as much as I would love to leave town again, I think I just need to stay home and try to focus on celebrating my husband. I ordered a gift for my father-in-law and it hit me that I didn’t have as many gifts to buy this year as in previous years. It is still an odd feeling when I stop to think about the fact that my father is missing all the celebrations and milestones.