What We Build After

August 13 was six months since my dad died. I didn’t realize it that morning.

That day I shared the first post from Cellopack, something I’ve been building. The Instagram account was connected to my Facebook, so the post ended up there too. People reacted to it. A few people reached out. It felt good to finally put something I’d been working on into the world. Then I realized what day it was.

Six months.

My first instinct was guilt. I thought about deleting the post. It felt strange to be sharing something new, something I was excited about, on a day that seemed like it should have been reserved for remembering my dad. But I left it up.

What bothered me wasn’t only that I hadn’t remembered the date. The harder thing to admit was that I’ve been happy.

I’ve been building a lot lately. Cellopack. This website. Ideas that have been sitting around for years. I’ve found myself staying up too late working on something because I want to, not because I have to. It has felt good.

And somewhere in all of that, I haven’t felt the loss of my dad as constantly as I did before. There was guilt in that too.

Shouldn’t I be sadder? Shouldn’t six months mean something? Shouldn’t I have known what day it was? Eventually I had a very simple thought.

My dad wouldn’t care.

My dad was a farmer. He worked with his hands his whole life. He was always building something, fixing something, or figuring out how to make something work better.

If what he needed didn’t exist, he’d make it. He’d draw up some way to improve a piece of equipment, then weld something together specifically for what he needed. There was always a problem to solve and some custom thing he could make to solve it.

When I think about him that way, the idea that he’d want me sitting around making sure I was sad enough six months after he died makes me laugh. I think he’d want me building.

That’s one way I keep him with me. There are quieter ones.

Most mornings on my drive to work, the sun comes through the driver’s side window and hits me in the face. I say, “Good morning, Dad.”

I started doing that two days after he died, sitting on the front porch of my parents’ house. The sun warmed my face after I said it, and for a moment it felt like he had answered.

“I love you so much.”

I still say good morning now.

Not always on the anniversaries.

Just on a Tuesday morning in the car.

For a while, his loss occupied so much space. It was difficult not to think about what was gone. Lately I’ve been thinking more about what he left.

My dad left behind a life. A family. Things he built. Things he fixed. Ways of seeing a problem and imagining that it could work a little better. And some of that is in me.

Maybe my responsibility isn’t to remain appropriately sad about the life that ended. Maybe it’s to do something with the life that continues.

Right now, that looks a lot like building. Cellopack is one of those things. A few days after I shared it publicly, someone signed up who I didn’t know. My first organic user.

Not a friend. Not a family member politely supporting another one of my ideas. Just some person who found the thing I made and decided it might be useful to them. I loved that.

I wish I could tell my dad about it. I wish I could show him what I’m working on, even though he probably wouldn’t understand half of it. He’d listen anyway. I wish I could hear what he’d say about some dumb problem I’ve spent four hours trying to solve.

But tomorrow morning I’ll get in the car and head to work. At some point the sun will come through the driver’s side window.

And I’ll say good morning.