A Warm Reminder

While grieving my father’s death, I went looking for anything that could lend meaning to his passing—and found comfort in an old coat.

- Sarah Richards

After my father died a few years ago, I spent hours looking for hidden messages. It was a maddening search, one that felt like running to the edge of a cliff in anticipation of discovering a beautiful, panoramic view, only to be paralyzed by terrifying heights. I desperately wanted to find an enlightening note he’d secretly tucked away, but I grew increasingly spooked by the idea that maybe I wouldn’t like what I found—if I found anything at all.

This frustrating state lasted for several days while we received family and friends at the farmhouse where he lived with my mother, about an hour outside of Red Deer, Alberta.

I went through his jeans pockets, nightstand drawers and shaving kit; the junk drawer in his dresser. I opened passports, shook out cowboy boots. Surely, somewhere, there was an SOS, a few words written out on a piece of paper acknowledging what had been happening to him, even if he hadn’t been willing to do so with his family.

My father had been dying; he didn’t know this, but he suspected he was. Nonetheless, he seemed incapable of acting—of seeking a better doctor, not just the one assigned to the rural hospital closest to the farm; of setting aside the chores of the day so he could figure out how he might be able to hold off death a little longer.