When You’re Still Someone’s Son

Today marks one year since my father died.

Yesterday, the Buffalo Bills started another season.

For most of the last twenty years, I rarely missed a Bills game with my dad.

That might sound like a small thing compared with everything a father and son share over a lifetime. But I am beginning to think the small things are exactly where death becomes the most real.

You expect the big days to hurt.

Birthdays. Holidays. Anniversaries.

You don't necessarily expect a football game to remind you that somebody is gone.

But for years, Sunday meant watching the Bills with my father. Sitting together, complaining about the play calling, celebrating when they won and wondering why we kept doing this to ourselves when they lost.

It became part of the architecture of my life.

And then one day it wasn't there anymore.

There is something strange about losing your father when you are already an older man.

I wasn't a kid suddenly trying to figure out how to grow up without his father. I was 60 years old when he died. I had raised children of my own. I had a career. Degrees. Decades of mistakes, victories, relationships and stories behind me.

By almost any definition, I was already grown.

And yet there was still a part of the world in which I was somebody's son.

My father was one of the few people left who had known me before I became any of those other things.

Before the jobs.

Before the degrees.

Before the relationships.

Before my children.

Before I had any idea who I was supposed to become.

He knew the original version.

I don't think I fully understood what that meant until he wasn't here anymore.

When you're young, your parents seem almost permanent. They are simply there. Part of the background of your life.

Then you get older and begin noticing that they are getting older too.

And eventually, the people who once seemed like the fixed points in your world begin to disappear.

Something shifts when that happens.

You move forward one position in line.

That may be one of the strangest parts of losing a parent later in life. Their death doesn't just make you think about their life.

It makes you think about your own.

Time suddenly feels different.

A year used to sound like a long time.

This one didn't.

Yesterday I watched the Bills again.

There were moments when I still had the instinct to turn toward my father and say something about what had just happened. To complain. To laugh. To hear what he thought.

And then, for a second, you remember.

He's not there.

Maybe that is what grief becomes after a while.

Not constant sadness.

Not crying every day.

Just these small moments when your old life briefly reaches for someone who is no longer in it.

One year later, I still don't think I completely understand what it means to live in a world without my father.

But after almost twenty years of Sundays watching the Bills together, I have a feeling that every football season from now on will carry a little bit of him with it.