The Man Underground

I miss him like a tree misses its roots when they are severed

When we die, do we look up through tree roots to see the sky?

My father died forty-five years ago today. I was just a teenager, unfinished, all nerve endings and Southern defiance. I wore low-riding blue jeans with big flared legs and believed I knew everything. He died in Grace Hospital on a humid spring morning, the air thick with lilacs and unsaid things. It was Mother’s Day weekend. We found the cards he had already bought for Mama in the trunk of his car, unsigned for all time. He was only fifty-three. Far too young, though I didn't know that then.

For most of my life, he’s been underground. I have outlived the version of him I knew by over a decade now. I picture him down there sometimes—not as a skeleton, not as ash or dust—but as a man seated cross-legged in a hollow chamber beneath the roots, watching quietly through some veil I can’t perceive. I don’t believe in ghosts exactly, but I believe in residue. In presence. In the possibility that love doesn't end when the body does, …