Fossils

Longing for lost things isn’t grief; it is a type of love I know well. It’s found in that particular ache of both knowing, with often blinding clarity, that something is gone and still believing that part of it exists. Like watching a hawk bend its legs to take off from a branch and imagining a dinosaur. Or staring at your hand and affectionately memorizing the temporary glistening trails of water and singular grains of sand left behind as the only proof that you did, in fact, once hold the ocean.

My dad was a Black man born in rural Tennessee in 1947. He had faced too much cruel reality to leave space for make-believe in our home. When I started kindergarten, he told me there was no Santa Claus, and if the other students said there was, it just meant that, unlike him, their parents were willing to lie to them. He and my mother had little patience for cartoons or Disney, so the first movie I saw in theaters was “Jurassic Park” when I was barely six. My parents dismissed the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and the boogie man; instead, the magic they gave me came from science and art, like watching silkworms transforming into fuzzy moths and VHS tapes of Alvin Ailey’s dancers defying physics. 

My parents loved each other with the passion and volatility of an addiction. As a very serious child, I often concluded they shouldn’t be together, especially when their relationship caused upheaval. I was born in Southern California’s Inland Empire but grew up in Hawaii. We didn’t move there as a family; one day, my mother took my brother and me from school with no luggage and flew back East, staying with members of her family for six months before flying to Honolulu on a whim. There we stayed in a homeless shelter until she got back on her feet. I hadn’t seen my dad or heard his voice all that time, but I knew he still loved me, and we’d be together again. Sure enough, there he was one day, with no explanation from either of them. Having missed my seventh birthday, he gave me an encyclopedia of dinosaurs. 

It was a book for a much older reader, which may have been his way of teaching me a lesson. My dad might have concluded that after what we’d already experienced, I’d been forced to grow up quickly, and much of my childhood was already over. Maybe he knew that I would need to be able to learn from fossils. To draw my own conclusions from the past while having the strength to remain flexible and change my mind when presented with new evidence. Much later, I realized that dinosaurs were the closest thing to fantasy that had ever really existed, making them incredibly special. My dad may have insisted that we always face our current reality, even when it was unforgivingly harsh and devoid of whimsy. But he also gave me one beautiful, wonderous exception, and I fell in love.

This love is not the kind of analytical devotion that leads someone to memorize scientific names and geological periods. It is a personal affection. As absurd as it sounds, there are days when I genuinely miss them with the ache of a lost but somewhat distant relative. By middle school, “Jurassic Park” had become my favorite movie. It made me believe that reality might be more porous than we’d imagined. And that with faith and process, humans could give things that are gone a restart.

When I was twenty-five, my dad died suddenly. He did not “pass away” because that implies a gentleness that neither of us experienced. I was pummeled by wave after wave of every conversation we’d never had, each fence left in disrepair and the bridges incomplete. We were speaking, but not on good terms. It was hard to grasp the immensity and finality of his absence until I realized that unless I died very young, he would miss most of my life. I was a year out of graduate school, living in my first apartment, and working two part-time jobs. He would not know if I published a book, bought a house, got married, traveled through Africa, or pursued my doctorate. I wondered how much of my own memories would be eroded by the loss. Would I forget the sound of his voice with that faded and hard-to-place accent? What about his walk and how it commanded your attention, even from the corner of your eye, especially when he flung his long hair? 

When I tried to understand the depth of this loss, set my course, and make progress, its vastness took hold, and I was powerless against its velocity. It was a salty sea, so exponentially bigger than me that I couldn’t comprehend its size. I was racked repeatedly by the distinct sensation of being rolled breathlessly forward, bits of broken shells scraping my skin at each turn, until the final stinging impact, slamming face-first into the damp sand of a wide shore. 

As I’ve gotten older, I have more understanding and empathy for my dad’s dilemma. He didn’t want his daughter to believe in fantasies and be disappointed, but he also didn’t want reality to limit me. So, he gave me the strangest, most extraordinary, real thing he could find. It has made me well-versed in loving something I can never see or hold and taught me to view facts with an openness to change. Every few years, paleontologists discover something that shifts what we thought we knew about dinosaurs. That something long gone could still be so relevant, and dynamic has always felt comforting.

Uncovering the fossil record of my dad’s life has been no different. For a man in the 1980s, he became a father relatively late, having my brother at thirty-eight and me at forty. He’d been a Southerner, the youngest of five siblings, and a medic in the Vietnam war before changing his name, becoming an artist, a devout New Yorker, and a husband. My dad never learned to swim because of an allergy to salt water and chlorine. But he enlisted in the Navy to avoid the draft and paid another man to take his swim test for him. Living on Oahu, his favorite place was Sunset Beach, and he was content to spend long days on the sand working on wood carvings and beaded jewelry, watching the ocean swallow the sun.

Losing him so young meant he hadn’t shared most of his life with me, and I’ve encountered our similarities by mistake. It is an odd sensation to remind people of someone you hadn’t known and to accept that you will always trigger these revelations. We both grew African violets and curated gallery exhibitions about travel, oddly specific traits my mother told me about from behind eyes glassy with tears. A few months after his death, as I was packing to move from one apartment to another, she confessed that a tiny ceramic frog, a bejeweled hair pain, and a cookbook called “Sunday Soup” were actually gifts from him that she had sent me in college when we weren’t speaking. These things had meant little to me but became treasured artifacts I now can’t bear to part with, like the teaspoon in his pocket when he died.

I feel guilty putting it into words, but in some ways, it has been easier to love my dad in death than it was in life. I attribute much of this to age and also to the gentle softening of hard feelings over time. My dad went to prison when I was fifteen. We never spoke on the phone, and he wrote twice to me: a letter in my junior year and a card for my high school graduation. They came long after I had interpreted his silence as cruel abandonment. He came home after my first year of college, but this separation was so much more painful than the one I’d experienced as a child. I didn’t know how to accept that he could still have loved me when he’d known exactly where I was and chose to stay silent. Years later, I came across letters to my mother, where he detailed his guilt for missing so many milestones, his pride in me, and his desire to earn a relationship with me someday. 

I hadn’t considered that my dad felt unworthy. It was another shared trait now fossilized. We both thought that, surely, we had more time. And, like any sudden death, his obliterated our plans and transformed whatever mundane conversation we’d had into forgotten last words. Its impact caused shock waves that will rumble for decades. I mourned for the man he was and the pent-up hope I had for our relationship until, ultimately, I learned to stay afloat on the waves that calm but always keep coming. To slide between and within them like I am flippered and can push against the water, passing through what washes in and out and continuing to move. Until 2022, it was believed that while there were many giant aquatic lizards, there were no swimming dinosaurs. Then paleontologists uncovered the one-foot-long Natovenator polydontus, the “many-toothed swimming hunter” in the Gobi desert. 

My mother insisted we spread his ashes in a park, not water. We stood in the overgrown ferns and took turns shaking free the contents of his rosewood urn at the base of a tree with sky-blue lobelia and bright orange nasturtium growing in its shade. The trunk had split, making two conjoined but distinct trees that towered above us. When we were done, our family reduced to three, and we stood quietly for a moment. Everything was dusted white, and beams of late summer sun cut through the canopy. 

If my dad had more time, a restart, I don’t know if we would have used it wisely, but I love entertaining the endless possibilities. Maybe we’d spend a day at Sunset Beach, me diving under the waves to find shells and him in the shade of his big hat, working on a wooden walking stick with a snake carved around it. I imagine that I am the aquatic evolution of his line. That somewhere between his lifespan and mine, we took to the ocean and adapted to hold our breath. Over time, the salt no longer stung our skin, and we dove deeper into the glittering sea, too far to hear the noise of the shore.

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Laili Gohartaj was a recognized finalist for the 2021 Crazy Horse Nonfiction Prize before publishing her first essay, “Summation,” in The Hennepin Review (August 2022). She was a 2022 Periplus Fellow, and her poem,“Things that I wish my father had said,” is in the Periplus Call & Response Anthology. Laili lives in Oakland, California, where she grows flowers for hummingbirds.