by Lisa López Smith

Knowing my fondness for all members of the animal kingdom, my father once brought an enormous cardboard box home and handed it to me. Inside, folded up and trembling, was a small blue parakeet. He had found it at work on the construction site, shivering in the brisk autumn air. I imagined those labour-worn hands, cracked and rough, cradling it amongst the thrumming of nail guns, drills, and the crass laughter of the workers.

Despite the cheerful chatter of the parakeet and my mom nixing without explanation my childish notion that Moonshine was a great name for a bird of his colouring, I somehow suspected our family was just too happy. It couldn’t last—a life like that: contented parents, a pet or two, my brother and I, living in the prettiest town in Canada, white picket fence and all.

I remember that time Dad collapsed on the concrete in the garage. I think it was dark outside, and Mom told me, “Wait with him while I call an ambulance.” I was just a kid and didn’t know what to do but stand there and say, “It’s okay, Dad. Mom is calling an ambulance.”

There were a few months in the hospital, but he never came back home. We humans like to romanticize the dead, and it was probably an easy job with someone like him anyhow: musical talent, caring, hard worker, loved his family, etc., until even my own memories were flattened as one-dimensional as a comic book page. With time, too, we had constructed him into the rough shape of a roof to console us and the bare walls of perfection.

It’s poor eulogizing, though, to draw someone into no more than a caricature, to remove the humanity of a person. Even flaws can have beautiful edges, but the bits where we fail aren’t talked about after death.

More than twenty-five years passed before I really realized that I didn’t actually know my father at all. Of course, I had a few frail memories. I knew facts about him. There were old photos in scrapbooks of birthdays and the beach, but details about who he was as a person? That, I didn’t know.

One day, I saw a friend mourning the anniversary of the death of her brother on Facebook, writing that no one understands the deep pain of losing a sibling. It rang with truth. Our partners can know us, and our parents can know us, but few others besides our siblings would live the same family culture and generational period. I thought of my father’s two brothers and sister; they must have known him better than most. I tossed out a short email to my uncle—my father’s youngest brother—who had visited us recently at our ranch in Mexico. What do you remember about him? I asked.

After decades of silence and their quintessential British stiff-upper-lip, my uncle’s multiple email replies contained anecdotes of which at least 95% I had never heard before. It was like throwing open the curtains in a darkened room:

There was that time the brothers put a garter snake in the voice box compartment of their sister’s doll, and how everyone screamed when it made its escape; and there were the camp cabins where they chopped wood and hunted berries, and how the others had prayed for the miracle which turned out to be a year’s income in wild rhododendron buds; and that time with the neighbour’s curtains and the fire which was an accident, but they hid every time they saw her afterward. And then, how the congregants would sit grim-faced when the brothers got the giggles during the hymns; and how my father engineered a hot air balloon out of straws, a bag, and birthday candles; and when all the kids were out on the streets playing cops n’ robbers or Red Rover or building tents out of blankets ‘til dinner time, or maybe trampolining in the broken-down Ford with the springs coming through the upholstery; and hanging out at the neighbours’ who had a television; and the afternoon they picked up their bikes to ride 160 kilometers to Chilliwack Lake, but of course, they couldn’t make it before dark.

And then, how all the girls wrote him love letters and the adults thought him so mature; and how he played trumpet and flamenco guitar and sang barbershop; and how the high school woodwork teacher remembered him saying, Oh you’re Smitty’s brother! And how he would get angry at his little brother for listening to those ‘druggie’ Beatles and using his bike without asking; and later, when he backpacked through Cold War Russia, camped with the Bedouins in Tunisia, and learned Spanish while picking grapes in Spain; how he could read faster than anyone else in the family and devoured novels and National Geographics and the naval log book of his grandfather; and how he liked to cook with his mom; and that far-away look in his blue eyes when he talked about things that he loved; and how he hated the changes of the modern world with its rock music and lax social mores; and how he got his pilot’s licence and apprenticed as a carpenter and did leatherwork and took up downhill skiing and how he got into disagreements so easily with his father. And then, how he also questioned his career choice later on, and…

Do you want to breathe life into a ghost? My father became more human with every line; the walls of his character filled with colour and wonder, and dark corners too, and struggle and hope and quirks. I read and reread the emails; they were like time travel to a place and person who left such an enormous gap in my life and yet who I barely knew.

As I wrote this essay, I listened to songs that I now know my father would have hated. But, would he, too, have softened around the edges, the way the survivors sometimes do? Maybe he would disagree with the way I think, but I’d like to imagine that he’d have liked the reasons I see things differently. How he’d have liked that I built an outdoorsy life like he wanted to live but didn’t have the chance to do, and how he’d be thrilled that his grandkids speak Spanish as a first language with big, bright eyes that look like his. I like to think that he’d have liked how I turned out, in my own beautifully flawed version of being human. I mean, I don’t hide snakes, and I love rock music, but I am hopelessly disorganized, have poor fashion sense, always forget to go to school meetings, and am prone to dark moods. Would he see how I, too, can’t tell a lie? My bookshelves stacked high, too?

Meeting my dad for the first time through his brother’s eyes distilled clarity for who I am. Maybe presence isn’t required for the story to roll on. Maybe that’s why pine smells of home for me no matter how long I live in the tropics and why I sing and read and ride my bike in the mountains. Maybe that’s why I, too, rambled all over the world, why I, too, picked up languages like t-shirts at the thrift store, why I became a shepherd of sheep and milk goats in Mexico rather than put my master’s degree to any sort of practical use.

Maybe that’s why, on one cold January night, I held that premature lamb, tender and collapsed, warm in my sweater. I don’t know why these things have to happen, but I didn’t let go until her tiny lungs just stopped—and I remembered my father’s work-hardened hands and his heart, too—and I wonder if the antidote to fear of death is just a constellation of stories telling us who we are.

Lisa López Smith is a shepherd and mother making her home in central Mexico. When not wrangling kids or rescue dogs or goats, you can probably find her working on her next novel. Her poems and essays have been published in over forty-five literary journals and nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and the Pushcart prize. Her first chapbook was published by Grayson Books in 2021.