'I’m still learning to embrace the few pieces of him I’ve claimed that exist outside the tragedy that took his life'
The author with her father in the summer of 2001. Photo: Nicole C. Foster Everyone always talks about how blue the skies were that day. As if the weather were a decoy.
By the end of that September, the posters were mostly taken down, and our hope that my dad was missing had given way to the cruel reality that he was gone. One thing I do remember from this time is my sister and me in our New Jersey backyard at dusk, each of us holding on to a balloon by a string as lightning bugs grazed our ankles. “Count down from ten, then let go and look up,” my mother told us, and we did, following the balloons as far as we could see.
In my father’s absence, we remembered him in the ways we could, through his love of music and his collection of classic-rock records and cassettes. In the car, my mom let my sister and me sing along to the lyrics of Pink Floyd, belting, “We don’t need no education,” knowing it would have made him laugh.
I spent hours of my childhood rummaging through boxes of photographs and home videos that were never enough to revive my memories of him. Later, I would Google his name and read legacy pages filled with heartbroken messages from his co-workers and friends, sifting through the digital debris in search of the remains of a life I didn’t get to know.
I now live in that same little beach town on the Jersey Shore, surrounded by my Mom’s many relatives from our extended Irish Catholic family. There’s no memorial for him here, but whenever my dad’s name comes up among family members, they invariably recount the last time they saw him. It was Labor Day weekend 2001, and my aunts, uncles, and a dozen or so cousins all brought their kids to see the fireworks, parking their beach chairs side by side in the sand.
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