Article content This Father’s Day will be the 11th I won’t be celebrating with my dad, who died in 2013. Time has, of course, softened the pain of irreversible loss. The thought of his absence in this world no longer cuts through me like a sharp knife.
But the dull ache of longing for what is no more never leaves me. I miss him. I suppose I always will.
More than a decade later, I still think of him often and wonder what his thoughts would have been on a variety of subjects — even if we rarely agreed on anything. I’m the daughter of an immigrant dad. I wrote my first book primarily because of how tired I was of listening to political rhetoric that treats people like my parents as liabilities, threats or problems to be solved.
I wanted to pay tribute to them and to that first generation who worked so damn hard to build a life here. Ours was an imperfect and complicated relationship. Like many other immigrant dads of his generation, he had minimal education and spent most of his life toiling in restaurants, working hard, contributing in his own way to this city, this province and this country.
In typical old-school Greek dad fashion, my dad wouldn’t openly express his love with words but would call me up to tell me to come by “to see how the tomato plants are growing,” code for “I miss you.” When he died, I worried I would forget essential things about him. I feared my memory would betray me in tiny increments and I’d slowly and gradually forget the little t.