I didn’t set out to write about losing my dad. I’ve intentionally avoided this topic for almost a year, mostly because writing is how I metabolize things, and writing about his death makes it feel real.
I did set out to write about Leo season, though, and I don’t think I can do that without writing about my dad.
My father, Francis, was born on August 22, 1959, the last day of Leo season. Today would have been his 62nd birthday. He died last summer, also during Leo season. It was sudden and tragic. I had less than 24 hours of pacing in circles outside the ICU to mentally prepare for life without a father. My mom, my sister, and I all got to say goodbye — well, kind of. My dad was intubated and heavily sedated before I got to the hospital, so we couldn’t actually converse. He barely stirred when I grasped his hand.
Was he in pain? Did he know we were there with him? Did he even know he was dying? I don’t know, and I never will, so I try not to think about it.
Leo is a fixed fire sign, which makes sense because my dad was fixed fire incarnate. We were always incredibly close. From a young age, I tried to channel him in my writing, my speech patterns, my mannerisms. When I opened my first bank account, I even modeled my signature after his. My mom likes to joke that we were always on the same wavelength; to this day, she tells me I sound like him. (This didn’t change after I came out, a gift I quite literally thanked him for on his deathbed. I realize how lucky I am. Queer people joke about having daddy issues for a reason.)
A small business owner in the music industry and a frequent guest lecturer at universities, my dad could easily enrapture even the most disinterested people in a room. But he wasn’t showy or deceptive. With Dad, there were no gimmicks. He was compelling because he radiated warmth and intelligence from within. The Sun is at home in Leo, the sign it rules. Dad was utterly at home in himself — his knowledge, his identity, his beliefs.
His fire burned steadily. Perhaps that’s why I have grieved his loss steadily, too. After he died, person after person warned me about the sharp pangs of grief I’d experience. I’ve felt them, sure — on his birthday less than a week after his death, on my birthday the following May, on my first Father’s Day without a father — but my grieving process has been characterized by consistent, low-level mourning. A dull but chronic ache.
“I’ve been preparing my whole life for a personal tragedy,” I once told my therapist. She laughed, but I wasn’t joking. I’ve been in and out of therapy for the better part of a decade. I have a litany of tried-and-true coping mechanisms and a stable support network at my disposal. We already established my natal 12th House Sun, for God’s sake. I know how to live and work while hurting.
I’ll admit, it is rather anticlimactic, what with the Leo of it all.
When I think of Leo season, I think of summers spent on Fire Island, a beach hamlet on the Long Island Sound. (You might know it as a gay party mecca, which is not wrong, although my family’s Fire Island home is in a sleepier neighborhood on the island.) I think of the sun beating down on my skin. I think of whispering in bed with my sister under the haze of a mosquito net. I think of grabbing packs of Marlboro Menthols for Dad at the store — the regular smokes, not the lites. I think of grilled fish so fresh, you can’t fathom eating anything else ever again.
I think of taking my partner to Fire Island for the first time, less than a month before my dad died. I think of confiding in my dad about how much I’d fallen for her. I think, selfishly, that his death robbed me of the Hot Girl Summer I’d manifested. I think of a Death Cab for Cutie lyric from 2005 I have always liked but only recently understood: “And it came to me then that every plan / Is a tiny prayer to Father Time.”
I think of the ocean, a sentimental thing for my dad, whose first hero was Jacques Cousteau, and thus a sentimental thing for me. I think of the love for the ocean he instilled in me, a reverent, childlike awe tempered by a healthy fear of forces beyond my control. I think of all the wave metaphors for grief and wish it were that rhythmic, that predictable.
I think of how dangerous swimming in the ocean actually is, and how I always do it anyway. I think of my natal Moon in Leo. I think of how water, in big and concentrated enough quantities, can quell fire.
I think of being a kid again, and how all those little cuts on my arms and legs, the last remnants of my bygone tomboy youth, always healed so much faster near the ocean.
I think of my dad.