"I tagged my father on Facebook by accident, yesterday.I’ve heard lots of people speak on..."

“I tagged my father on Facebook by accident, yesterday.

I’ve heard lots of people speak on these

social media eulogies—heard them say

the comfort they take in the lingering presence

of names too easily forgotten,

heard them say they are grateful

that our footprint on this world is

just a little bit harder to erase.

But I am so tired of making gospel

of a dead man.

I hate the way he shows up in the suggestions

every time I type my own last name;

this is a strange kind of haunting–

one where I do not see him in the shadows

of my parents’ home, but instead

at three AM in my own apartment,

cities away from the place where he died.

Two and a half years later,

and he is still smiling in his profile picture.

I didn’t do poetry when my father was alive.

But a few weeks ago, I accidentally invited him

to a poetry slam in a city he’s never been to.

And maybe there was a part of me

still hoping he’d show up to it.

I have a lot of things left to say to my father,

got a lot of heartbreak that went unanswered for,

apologies on both sides that were never given.

But this is not the kind of grief you leave

on a Facebook wall. This is not

“I thought about you, today” kind of pain.

And I can’t help but resent all the people

whose aftermath is so simple

as to be parsed out in a three hundred character paragraph

on a page my family does not have the password for.

How dare their grief be so succinct.

I have spent two and a half years

trying to put words to this,

I still don’t have enough of them.

I cannot stomach the “I miss you”s from strangers:

people he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years,

people who did not know the ugly of his last moments,

who remember the man before the sickness,

who did not grow up in a house full of landmines,

did not kiss their father goodnight knowing

he was a time-bomb.

I know it’s selfish, but

I do not want to be privy to their second-hand grief.

I don’t care what his college friends have to say about him.

His wall has become a morgue I did not want

to be buried in.

So instead, I resurrect his ghost on a microphone,

I pray to half-forgotten echoes of a childhood

where his love did not come with a caveat,

I refuse to lay him down to rest and yet

I have the gall to be sanctimonious.

All this time, and I am still willing

to put parameters around everyone else’s grieving

without taking responsibility for my own.

My father’s Facebook wall is a reminder

of all the people who have managed to move on

from his passing, when here I am:

writing the same poem

for the hundredth time,

no closer to being able

to say goodbye to him.”

- FACEBOOK EULOGIES by Ashe Vernon