The dreams are both the best and the worst. The possibility that all of this is a mistake, that he is not dead, that there has been a misunderstanding. Those are the best because those are moments of subconscious hope. Those are also the worst because as soon as I wake up, I know it’s a dream. That there no mistake, that he is gone. The worst dream of all was the one where I knew even in the dream that he was dead, but I saw him outside my child’s school, clad in his wool coat and leather gloves, just as he would be in life….When I turned back to confirm it was in fact him, he was gone.

There are other bad things. His remains are ready. Have been ready. Are in an urn that he picked. But I can’t bring myself to gather them, to do what he wanted with them, to keep them or to even have them in my possession. So they sit alone in his house, as he did for much of his life, only then it was by choice.  I sometimes pitied his (self-imposed) solitude then too. But not like this.

His house. While it wasn’t large or showy, it was purely him. The silverware handed down from his parents; the antiques; the pictures everywhere of his travels, beaming pride and foreignness and life. The displayed pictures of his grandchildren that came to a halt when he got sick. Both of my children displayed but not both of my sister’s because he was too feeble to put pictures up when her younger daughter was born. The birthday card I gave him with those final words I hadn’t worked up the courage to say to his face, but had the lesser courage to write. The card, given to him two short weeks before he died. It is lying on the table where his hospital bed used to be, now re-formed into a living room so as to show his home to sell it. It is lying where he once was, only the card looked fuller and more meaningful in his hands than it does now, lying solitary on the table.

It is the card that I hope he could read, despite his illness, despite my penmanship, despite his exhaustion. It looks unread, un-creased even though I was there when he opened it and read it. He said, “Nice,” when I gave it to him. Which of course, knowing him and who he was could have meant “I can’t read a word of this but I don’t want to admit it” or “I am glad you felt my love even though I wasn’t great at showing it.”

I have the last words he “spoke” to me, also quintessentially him. For on his deathbed, when he could not really speak as he had lost his voice, when every breath rattled with pain, he took the time to communicate a fleeting thought with my sister and me. As he pointed at my sister’s red-rimmed eyes, as we guessed “red eyes?” “She’s crying?” “Your eyes?” No, no, he made sure to tell us: Yes “eyes.” But eye “S-O-R-E,” he rasped, with a nod to his first-time (and okay, admittedly homely) home health aide.  We laughed uproariously about this, my sister and I, we did. Because as we huddled in for his final words of wisdom, what we got instead was classic Daniel.

But I don’t really want any of these things. What I would like is something tangible. For example, him. A last hug. Or barring that, finding an unread letter he wrote to me. Or even a “sign” that people talk about getting from dead loved ones.  For in my ongoing hope that some sort of faith or belief or gazing upward  will bring him to me (it hasn’t), I look for these so-called signs. A sense that he is here. There are no signs. I have pictures. I have old voice mails where he doesn’t sound quite right because by the time I started saving his messages, he was already sick.

I have a shirt of his which I inhale, hoping to bring him to me even if just for a few seconds. I will take one second of smelling him, flooding him back to me olfactory.  But though that shirt is him – I can picture him wearing it –  he did not wear it at the end when he was home-bound and had no need for long-sleeved shirts. So while it smells like his house, it does not capture his essence no matter how many times I go back hoping for that glimmer. His dad-like smell: That too is gone.

I have what he left me in death: A complicated will that was changed last minute. A recording of his voice. His belongings. But I don’t have him, a fact that becomes more and more obvious as time passes. So while it is less raw, it is more real. And that, I have found, is not really better.