Susan Finch
How to Mourn Your Father When You’re a Mom
Sometimes you cry while driving to school and soccer practice and basketball practice and the PTO meeting and the doctor’s appointment and the dentist’s appointment and the spring band concert (where a colleague will offer condolences for your loss and then ask immediately how your father died. Tell him the softest version of the story, he never woke up from surgery, but not about the brutal days in the ICU where your father was in constant care, and you witnessed all the failed efforts to save him). Sometimes when you drive, your daughter will watch a cartoon about a dog who has a good dad, and you will weep because you had a good dad, and you miss him.
Grief hallucinations are part of the bereavement process. Hallucinate your father at the hardware store. He’s wearing his red vest, hiking pants, and shuffling in his white orthopedic tennis shoes, and you expect to hear his throat clear and for him to call out your name because he was always excited to see you. It wasn’t just you. He was excited to see everyone—his kids, his friends, his former patients and students, people that he didn’t even really know, people that he didn’t even really like, cashiers, servers, the teenagers collecting grocery carts from the parking lot. Hello! he’d call out, How are you today? as if he’d talked to this same stranger just yesterday.
That final day in the hospital, he spoke to everyone as he was rolled to surgery, a surgery you now realize he knew he would not wake up from. But you didn’t know. He didn’t want you to be frightened. He wanted to stay positive. This is the best nurse, he said about all the nurses. You’re doing a great job! he told them. More often than not, the nurse would look up, startled, maybe she didn’t remember the last time someone told her she was doing a good job. But you knew praise. Your father was an excellent cheerleader.
Your daughter, only six, often reminds you that your father is dead. She is not trying to be hurtful. Tex, her grandfather, is the only person in her life who has died. She will know him from your memories. Tell her—he liked pecan sandies, planting flowers, keeping a compost pile, watching college basketball, and he loved to sing, especially musicals. Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, and Annie Get Your Gun were a few of his favorites. Your daughter, fiercely competitive, likes the song, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.” You’re pretty sure she is singing it directly to you. When you share memories of your father, she reminds you Tex can’t eat or garden or sing anymore because he’s dead. She’s grappling with the reality of it, as are you, but it still feels like being sucker-punched by a tiny six-year-old fist. It won’t kill you, but it stings. Out of the blue one morning, she draws two astronauts with comically large helmets; their stick bodies float in space, and the earth is far behind them. “This is you and Tex,” she says, and when you hug her, throat tight with tears, you wonder if she’s understood how you feel untethered without your father. She rests her head on your shoulder for a minute, and says again, “He’s dead, mommy,” and you say, “I know, sweetie.”
Dream of hiking with your father. You are on a trail near your house, the same place you trained with him to climb a mountain, packing kitty litter in your backpacks to mimic the weight of your future gear. Enormous oaks and old mulberries shade the trail, and despite the sunny day, the woods are cool underneath the canopy. The trees are in summer bloom, and your father is in front of you, wearing a red cap. He keeps waving you on, encouraging you, but you can’t catch up. It’s okay because he would never leave you behind. Listen to his boots crunch along the path, occasionally stumbling on a protruding root, but never falling. Wake up happy to have spent time with him in the dream woods, happy not to think about him in the ICU with every tube funneling in and out of his body. Cling to the sound of the woods, the quiet of the trail, the feeling that you are together.
You miss him when your son’s soccer team wins the State Championship and when you get the news that your first book will be published. You want to tell him so many things. You take out your phone to call so many times. You miss him on your birthday and the silly songs he would leave on your voicemail. Listen to one on the first birthday he misses, and you think hearing it might kill you, but it doesn’t it. It fills you with joy and sadness simultaneously, and you know you are lucky to have a dad that you miss. Miss him when the flowers bloom in the spring. The daffodils he planted in your yard are staked with bright flags so the children will not trample them. Even though your father told you daffodils are hardy, you worry about the late snows and sudden freezes, you want to protect them.
Miss him when you have the time and miss him when you don’t. Most of the crying is done in the shower or while you’re driving one of your children from one place to another. If your kids see you sad, they don’t comment, they don’t reach over to pat your hand, and they don’t ask what is wrong. Maybe they don’t notice, maybe they do notice and don’t know what to say, or maybe they are just enjoying the song on the radio, the flicker of the yellow daffodils spotting the green lawns. Maybe the invisible tether between you and your children lets them float here in space beside you, knowing that you’ll always be their mom.
Susan Finch is an Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and a Professor of English at Belmont University. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Crab Orchard Review, New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection of short stories, Dear Second Husband, will be published in Spring 2026 from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her family.