It’s been a year since my dad died. It’s been a strange day, especially when I hold it against last year.

Last year, it was crisis and crying and doctors and hospital beds and tubes and prayers and feeling emotionally scraped out. Losing things at gas stations and stores, checking out of hotels, drinking take-out coffee. Family text chains full of instructions and logistics.

This year, I woke up in my own bed. I showered and thought about things that needed to happen at my job and in my household. I ate breakfast and drank coffee and had a few meetings. Then I packed up and my sister and I drove down to my mom’s house.

But that’s not the whole story. Because in between all those quotidian things, I also cried. And felt sad. And remembered my dad’s last day: the hospital bed and the prayers and the tears and the weird basket full of bottled water and healthy snacks that the Mayo Clinic gives you after enduring a loved-one’s death.

Today, I couldn’t decide what I should do or feel. My husband said I was acting weird. I was acting weird. I was not subsumed by grief or consumed by life, but somewhere in between both. It’s been a year and I guess this whole time, I have been slowly moving to what is a kind of middle.

Last year on this day, I napped and cried and ate. I made phone calls and texts. I walked through the woods behind my parents’ house and looked at trees and leaves and mushrooms. I startled deer and saw birds and bugs and sunlight flitter through the canopy.

This year, the day had a little more shape. I made provisions and plans. Packed my work laptop and some clothes and my dog Jelly and filled up the tank of my car. I ate leftover pizza. Collected my sister. We stopped at Dairy Queen. We sat in traffic. We talked.

And then, when we got to my mother’s house, which used to be my father’s house, too, my sister wandered off to weed my mother’s flower garden. I did a little work and checked emails. Then my sister called me over to look at some monarch caterpillars she had found in the flower garden. Together, we checked the other milkweed plants for more, lifting up the underside of the leaves to see.

Then my dog started sniffing his way back into the woods. So I followed him. I thought about what my dad would think of the state of his woods. The mosquitoes weren’t biting me, but they never really do. They really like to bite my sister. They liked my dad, too.

It was late afternoon. The light in the woods was beautiful. I took pictures of what I saw. Some of the things were mushrooms. I don’t know if my dad cared about mushrooms, especially not the way I’ve come to, not as food to forage but as these small, surprising, slightly disgusting treasures I get to find. That we can’t ask him for this meager opinion or anything else, either, always hits me hard. The scarcity I’ve always worked against in my head—there will not be enough, nobody will help you, nothing is going to work out—flares up when I think of all the missed chances I had with my father. I didn’t ever think to ask him about mushrooms. I didn’t know that I would ever care.

My parents bought this property, a couple years before I got married, in 1997. It’s shaped like the state of Idaho, a narrow strip beginning at the road and widening out toward the ravine. My mother loved having a big garden. My dad liked having space and privacy and the ability to putz around his land. Not a hunter or a hiker or a naturalist, my dad’s main activity in the woods was clearing dead trees and splitting logs for the fire place. He built a gazebo out near the edge of the ravine where he would sometimes go to read and take naps. Each year, he tried to put fresh wood chips on the path and make sure it was clear to walk.

Tomorrow, we spread half of his ashes into my mother’s flower garden where my sister found the monarch caterpillars. We will eat and be together. I can’t decide how to think about this, which is unsettling. I like to be able to put down a narrative line and hang onto it when I feel upset. Tell myself that this is what’s happening.

But who knows what will happen. Maybe we’ll eat too much and feel good? Maybe we won’t be able to eat anything and feel like shit? Maybe the power will go out and we’ll just drive to town and go to a restaurant? Maybe the dogs will jump on the counters and eat everything and we’ll all laugh and get drunk and watch re-runs of Dateline. If there’s anything this year has shown me, it’s that plans and narratives and menus all have limits and it’s okay that I don’t know how to do this. Maybe next year, it’ll all become clearer.

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