elephant

a message for my father, David S. Johnsen (January 19, 1966 - September 8, 2025)

I’d forgotten that I’d been a child. Favorite dinosaur: triceratops, favorite animal: elephant. Selected on their merits as herbivores, gentle giants. I liked that you were safe, so much bigger than me.

Gwyn pulled the photos from Mom’s old digicam, and there I am, your daughter again. And you’re really my Dad — clear and sure before the illness made a changeling of you. My real dad was black-haired and suntanned, even-toothed and flat-browed, anthemic when he grinned. My real dad’s jokes landed. My real dad was strong.

But that was almost twenty years ago. “It’s been so hard,” your mourners chorused at the wake, wrinkling sympathetic eyebrows in reference to your drawn-out decline. But they couldn’t understand. I flinch every time someone else opens the door. Only three people will ever know why.

I’ve been paying wayward tribute to you since I moved away, wearing your old clothes and listening to your music, though I sensed a sacrilege in memorializing you before you were gone. For so long, I couldn’t look you in the eye. My birthday will always settle around Father’s Day. I resented sharing it, but I doubt I will now.

The locus of my grief could be anger, but I am too tired for any more rage. I’ve tried to fix your portrait the way everybody tries, illustrating you by what you used to like. In your image, we adhere model airplanes, the Green Bay Packers, Jamie Oliver’s brownie recipe. It’s marginal, but it helps.

Shannon returned the photographs that Mom had once gifted her, and I got to rifle through them the night before I left Wisconsin. I could see my mother’s youth in motion. I know her so well. I could hear her laughter in the mute prints, trace her movement through the stillness. In the glint of her maintained smile, she’s as she always was and has continued to be. And there you are in front of her, swinging at a piñata on your 30th birthday. She is behind you, manning a blindfold, and her laughter rings through the living room. I can see your bat strike the piñata, hear your rumbling chuckle, but it’s faded, distorted. I have failed to save the specificity of you.

It wasn’t your fault that you were sick, but you weren’t there when I looked at you. Maybe I’m to blame. I gave up on fighting for you, so I lost what was left of you. I’ve knit sweaters for Mom, Gwyn, and myself over the past year. Now, I contend with the hollow fact that I can never gift one to you. You never took off the bracelet Gwyn wove you; even now, you wear it. I’m so, so sorry, Dad. I should’ve considered that I would run out of time.

The photos help me remember you in hazy, good-time childhood, but I have some late-stage memories of my own, too. That summer evening you told me a harebrained tale about buying alcohol for a pre-fame, underage Uma Thurman when she visited Madison. It didn’t make any sense for that story to be true, but I was game to believe you. That one family holiday when you joked that Nikolai had “a lot of nickels,” and Gwyn actually laughed. You thought Billie Eilish was really cool when they played her on 102.1. You still had it in you to surprise me.

I texted Gwyn my speculation that you would’ve loved hyperpop, and she agreed. I let myself dream about a world in which you stayed healthy, how we would’ve traded activities: I would’ve gone to Packers games with you, and you would’ve gone to concerts with me. It hit me, then, that there was absolutely no chance for any of that to happen anymore. I hadn’t wanted to share anything with you in so long. I’ve kept so many sores hidden under bandages. Now, I peel them back to find that nothing has healed. They fester.

But there is something alchemical that I didn’t expect. Now that the circle is completed, now that the withering has reached a close, I feel certain that you are whole again somewhere. When I think of my dad, I think of Dad. I think of you. And I love you — my love fills pools for you. I am not afraid of you, embarrassed by you, or mute in the face of your complications. I am your daughter again.

I wish I could have loved you like that to your face. I wish I would have been braver: strong enough to look into your eyes, see the abyss, and still find you in there, somewhere small. I wish I would have accomplished some closeness with you. I wish I hadn’t been so afraid.

Do you understand why I was, though? There are years of my life I’ve blacked out with solid marker. Young years, when I was first unlearning how to trust you. I have not recovered from these.

When this eternal September ends, there will be more living left for me to do. For me, there is the messy room, the anemic methods of self-preservation, the career disquietude, the stories I can never find time to write. There is money I tire of making but spend too briskly, there are people to see and to avoid. There is the ever-fattening past, thumping me over the head repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper, shrieking, “Don’t you GET it already?!” though I still don’t understand. I stare at thick, rolling fields, and I do not know what grass grows there.

There is a photograph of you that has been recently fished out of the ether, and it’s my new favorite. Mom says it was taken before she met you, so I estimate you’re about my current age in it. It’s you in a suit, laughing at a party, eyes almost-shut. You’re playing with your tie absently, towering over the other red-faced boys. “White boy wasted,” I quipped to Gwyn. If you were here, I’d beg you for the story behind it. You’d tell it, and we’d laugh at how dopey and charming you were. You look younger here than I’ve ever seen, really and truly alight. So, this is the man my mother met at that St. Patrick’s Day party. Flippant and goofy, but there you are — the center of gravity.

I love you and I miss you, Dad. I wish it all would’ve gone differently.