I’m sitting here in my little house in Los Angeles, wishing more than I have in a long time that you were still here. Some terrible things have happened in our country and I don’t know which way to turn. I feel angry and confused and sad. So, so sad. I suddenly don’t know who to be or how to be and nothing, nothing feels right.

It’s getting late and I’m tired but I had to write to you. Almost seventy years ago today, your entire life changed when a bomber plane you were piloting during WWII was attacked and shot to pieces in the air. You lost half of your crew in that attack and you were forced to parachute to the ground below, only to be captured by German soldiers and detained for the remaining six months of the war. This incident shaped everything about the man you would become. It made you brave and wise and compassionate. It made you strong and courageous and so, so generous.

I still remember when I finally got through to you the morning of the attacks on 9/11. Me calling from my cell phone in New York to your little condominium in Southern California. I’ve never thought about how worried you must have been about me, until just now, and to think of it causes tears to stream down my cheeks. I had tried all morning to call but the phones weren’t working, and I wasn’t able to get through to you for the first hours after the attacks. I imagine you now at home in front of the television, worried for your young twenty-four year old daughter in Manhattan.

I had never thought much about a parent’s worry. Until I became one.

And then again this week in an even deeper way.

But that morning on September 11 I finally got through to you, and I was crying and so scared, and you were you. Calm and wise, telling me that everything would be okay, even if you weren’t really sure if it would be.

And now I want to call you again. I want you to tell me that everything is going to be okay. That I’m going to be okay. That my sweet, young daughters are going to be okay.

But I can’t. You aren’t here anymore.

I’ll never forget the voice you used with me when I was scared or sad. It was a voice I never heard you use with anyone else. You were patient and kind and gentle and, no matter what, you always made me feel like everything was going to be okay.

I know that Greg and I have to be that for our girls now. We have to be calm and kind and strong and brave, and we have to create a world where everything is okay again. Because that’s what parents must do for their children. We take care of the world for them, until they can do it themselves.

If we are so lucky.

Thank you for the lessons. I miss you so, so very much.

With love, and unwavering admiration,

Claire

Today is August 5^th, 2012. You died nine years ago. Funny, it seems like it was yesterday, and also a lifetime ago.

For a long time that evening stayed in my head. The balmy California dusk, the palm trees outside your bedroom window and the sound of kids splashing in the complex pool, after you had taken your last breaths and I was alone in the world.

But that was nine years ago, and now here I sit, in my office in Beverly Hills on a sunny, Sunday afternoon, 34 years old with a husband and two children at home. Part of me wants to implore, “Can you believe it, dad? I’m a mom? A wife? I made it past your death? Can you believe it?” But of course you would believe it.

Those are the very things – children, a family to call my own — that I’m sure you hoped for me. Those are the things I think you felt certain I would find, no matter how far I fell after you died. I hope that I have the same confidence in my girls one day, that no matter what happens to me, that they’ll survive. That they’ll thrive. I think some part of me knows that already. I mean it’s what we all do, isn’t it? We survive.

I wish you were here to meet my daughters, dad. You would love them so much. They both remind me of you in such strange ways sometimes. Something about their eyes, their determination to live and breathe and be part of this life. And not just that, but their determination to enjoy this life, to find mirth and delight and mischief and wonder in it all. That’s what you were best at, dad. Even when you were weighed down by life it seemed like all you had to do was pause, take a breath and some kind of light would find its way back to your eyes, a smile there, even if it wasn’t on your lips.

I miss you so much, Dad. And sometimes for the silliest things. This morning I was rummaging through the toolbox and I saw a spool of shower tape and remembered the afternoon you instructed me, weak from bed, on how to install a new showerhead. I’d wanted to skip the part with the shower tape – it seemed overly dramatic to have to wind that flimsy tape around the base before screwing on the nozzle – but you shook your head and stared me down and I finally retreated to the bathroom to do as you had told.

A few months later, living on my own for the first time I had to do it again. This time I skipped the tape, that seemingly unnecessary step, and when the water sprayed down the room proving that you had been right, I sighed and began again, winding the soft blue tape around the base, just like you’d said had to be done. And I smiled, glad to have had you teach me that, but sad too that there would so much more I would never learn from you.

I watch my daughters with their dad now and think about the kind of relationship they’ll have with him, about the way they’ll revere him and sometimes loathe him too, just as I did with you. Mostly I revered you, loved you. Still do. There have been times in the last year in which I wept, really wishing I could call you. Feeling confused and overwhelmed by life and all that has presented itself, wishing so much I could hear your kind and gentle voice talking me down from the ledge upon which I teetered, knowing you’d have some advice and soothing words to turn whatever felt big into something smaller. I have no doubt that Greg will be able to do that for our girls time and time again in their lives. Such is the art of fathers, I think. Turning what is large into something smaller, something softer and less scary, something we can handle.

I miss that in my life so much now. Just someone bigger and wiser and stronger than me, someone to tell me that these years will unfurl whether I want them to or not, that whatever is true now, will change and be both less true and even truer later. That whatever scary thing has awoken me from sleep or set me to crying on a Tuesday morning, won’t be the thing that takes away the light at the end of the day.

Nine years ago today I held your hand as you took your last breath. I’d been so determined to be there with you as you left this world, dad. It seemed like the smallest thing to be able to give in return for all that you had given to me, but it was all I had. I know it will always be one of the things I’ve worked hardest at in this life – being there in that moment – but it will always be one of the things I am most glad I was able to do.

With unending love,

Claire

But really, what I thought most about that day was California. As I wound along the 405 freeway for miles and miles, as I drove past long-familiar exits like Golden West and Beach Blvd., my eyes skimmed to all the places where my father once lived. I thought so much about him and his years in California, first as a young man in Pasadena and then as an old man in Garden Grove. He first moved to California in his mid-twenties, along with his wife, three children, as well as his mother and sister, all of them exiling themselves from Michigan, the only place any of them had ever called home.

My grandmother got a job as a perfume lady at a department store and my aunt Jean worked at an auto-dealership, which in the 1950s was kind of glamorous. She set her blond hair into waves each morning and spent her days smiling at customers amidst the gleaming new engines of big, beautiful cars. My father and his little family settled in Pasadena, his wife staying home with the kids while my father drove off each morning down the oak tree-lined streets to his engineering job.

My grandmother and my aunt never left California, settling into Long Beach as if they’d always known that this was the turn life would take for them. My father and his family were here for at least fifteen years before moving on to Florida and eventually to Atlanta, my father following his dreams of owning a steel manufacturing company. It was in Florida where he divorced his first wife; he was living in Atlanta when he met my mother. For years after he married my mother and had me, we flew out to California at least once a year to visit his mother and sister. I don’t remember what my father thought about California. I only remember my own fascination with it, with the constant sunshine and ocean air, the strange plants pushing themselves out of every corner and crevice, and the bright, tropical flowers cascading over front doorsteps and back fences.

One year on a visit that we took when I was eleven or twelve, we all drove down to Laguna Beach, and I completely fell in love with its oceanfront cliffs and glimmering, artistic community. For months after we returned home I wrote stories about a girl who ran away to Laguna Beach. Even after the stories stopped my fondness for California never quite abated, and later in high school my best friend Liz and I schemed to go to UCLA for college. But then I got swept up by life, and also by New England, and for quite some time I forgot about California.

My father never forgot about California though, and after my mother died he moved back here. He lived with his sister Jean in her condo in Garden Grove until she died only a few months later of pancreatic cancer. She left not just her avocado-green couches and swimming pool-sized ashtrays, but the entire condo, to my father. And he was happy here, among the soft warm air and palm trees, and each time I visited him from New York I could see it in the way he always had something new to show me about this place he once again called home. He took me long drives up through the hills of Riverside or out into the desert. He pointed out plants and mountains and water ways that would seemingly never exist elsewhere. And I stared out the window at the little bungalow homes and the tropical flowers passing by and I was glad my father was happy, even I longed to return to the grit and grime of New York City.

I moved here when I was twenty-four, and right into Hollywood, where I failed to fall in love with my new city right away. It was really only after moving to the beach over a year later that California’s strange shimmering air and tropical plants filled up my heart before I really knew what was happening. I realized then why I could never shake the feeling all those years that my father knew something I didn’t. It was if he’d always known that this was where I belonged, but typical to my father, he let me figure it out on my own.

It’s a strange thing to love a place. We’re so good at loving people and things, but so many of us spend years and years in places that fail to inspire us. The first place I ever loved was New York City, and I still love it. Each time I visit, it’s akin to running into an ex-lover, one who I’m never quite sure I should have left. I could equate my time in Chicago to a lover as well, my life there like a forced relationship I always knew was never quite going to work out. On the flip side, returning here to Los Angeles last year felt like coming home, in the deepest sense that I’ve ever known.

Funny that we often think the place where we grew up is where we belong, and how many of us never bother to find out if that’s true or not. Driving back to Santa Monica the other night, I realized that I’ll never stop feeling grateful to my father for giving me this place, for showing me where my home was.