Happy Birthday Dad. I think you’d love it here.

The body keeps the score.

I’ve heard that phrase plenty of times. I understood what it meant, technically. But I don’t think I really understood what it meant for me until I started noticing that every year, somewhere around the beginning of September, something in me changes.

I’m more emotional. More sensitive. Things feel heavier than they should. I want to be taken care of. I want someone else to know the answer. I want to call someone and say, “I don’t know what to do,” and have them tell me.

And every year it takes me a minute to realize…Oh, It’s September. My body remembers before my brain does.

September 15 is my dad’s birthday, and no matter how old I get, somewhere inside this very grown-up life I have built is an 18-year-old girl who still really, really needs her dad.

Maybe that’s because I learned entirely too young that the adults you think will always be there… won’t always be there.

I was 16 when my grandpa died. He didn’t just feel like a grandpa. He raised me right alongside my parents. And at 16 years old, I sat and watched him die in a place where I had no way to contact anyone. There was no way out but to leave him, lifeless, and walk to the main road for help.

Two years later, I lost my dad.

I was 18.

Eighteen is such a strange age to lose a parent because everyone is telling you that you’re an adult while you are still very much somebody’s child. I had barely started becoming a person. I didn’t know yet about careers or marriages or babies or mortgages or heartbreak or raising teenagers. I didn’t know how many times in my life I would desperately want to pick up the phone and ask my dad a question. I didn’t know how many versions of me he would never get to meet.

After Dad died, my grandma filled so much of that space. She became the caregiver. The safety net. The person above me in the family tree. And then I lost her when I was 26 to a four year battle with cancer. Then came my mom, when I was 33, and just learning what all moms and daughters learn when they’re both moms and adults.

And that one did something different, because suddenly there was no generation above me anymore. No mom. No dad. No grandparents. No immediate family left who remembered me when I was little. Nobody left who knew me before I had to become capable. Nobody to call who could say, “I’ve got it. You just come home.”

I was the grown-up now.

And I think that is one of the strangest parts of losing everyone who raised you young. Life keeps moving forward and you move forward with it. You build a life. You raise babies. You make decisions. You become the emergency contact. You become the person your children call when they don’t know what to do.

You learn how to handle things because there really isn’t another option, and people see that version of you.

Strong. Independent. Capable. Resilient.

They don’t always see that sometimes being the person who can handle everything is really just what happens when the people you would have handed it to are gone.

I have spent a lot of my life being very, very good at being okay.

But the body keeps the score.

And every September, mine remembers that before I was the mom, the wife, the professional, the coach, the student, the woman who figures it out…

I was somebody’s little girl. I was his little girl. And I still am.

I used to think grief was something you were supposed to conquer. That eventually enough birthdays and holidays and anniversaries would pass and they wouldn’t have so much power anymore.

Now I think grief just grows up with you.

At 18, I grieved the dad I had just lost.

Now I grieve the dad I wish I could introduce to the life I built.

Dad, you have missed so much.

You never got to meet my girls. You never got to watch me become their mom. You never got to see me finish college, then a master’s, or know that your daughter decided apparently that still wasn’t enough school. You never got to see the career I built, the mistakes I made, the things I survived, the times I started over. You didn’t get to meet the woman I became.

And God, I wish you had.

There are so many times I wonder what you would think of me now. There are so many stories I wish I could tell you. There are so many moments when I would give anything to sit beside you and hear your opinion, even though I’m quite sure there are plenty of times I wouldn’t like your opinion at all.

I would take it anyway.

All of it.

Because I would take one ordinary day with you over almost anything.

But I’m learning something about grief as I get older. Missing you and celebrating you are allowed to exist in the same place. I don’t have to spend your birthday only thinking about the fact that you’re gone.

Because September 15 isn’t the day you left. It’s the day you got here.

And thank God you did.

Because before there was all this grief, there was you. There were 18 years when I got to have a dad. There were jokes and memories and plain days I didn’t know I should memorize. There was a little girl who knew what it felt like to belong to you.

And maybe that is why my body still knows this date.

Maybe grief isn’t only the body remembering what hurt. Maybe sometimes it is the body remembering what it loved.

So when September comes and I feel myself getting softer, sadder, a little less capable, I’m trying not to fight it anymore. I’m letting that little girl show up. She has been very brave for a very long time.

She has lost every adult she thought would always be there and somehow built a beautiful life anyway.

But she still misses her dad.

She still wants him to see her. She still wants to tell him everything. She still wants, just for a minute, to not be the grown-up.

So today, I’m letting her miss you, but I’m also letting her celebrate you.

Happy birthday, Dad. I wish you were here.

I wish you could see my life. I wish you could know my girls. I wish they could know you. I wish you could see who I became, and I really hope you’d be proud of her.

There is so much life between the 18-year-old girl who lost you and the woman writing this now.

And yet, she is still right here. Still loving you. Still missing you. Still wishing she could call her dad.

I have learned how to live a whole life without you. I have learned how to be the grown-up without any of my grown-ups.

I have learned that joy can live right beside grief, and that celebrating the life I have does not mean loving the people who should be here any less.

But I don’t think I will ever outgrow being your daughter. And I don’t want to.

Happy birthday, Dad.

I love you more than all the years between then and now. And I miss you in ways my mind sometimes forgets…

but my body never does.