A dragonfly alights on a broad green leaf, luminous in the summer sunshine. Can the plant feel its soft touch, I wonder. Does it sense the shimmering presence as the dragonfly flits away again, so quickly it almost seems as if it had never been there in the first place.
I talk to dragonflies. Out loud, sometimes; other times in a sort of telepathy that I'm convinced the dragonfly understands.
I started two years ago, sitting at the edge of the lake. It was intended to be a relaxing summer camping trip but became instead a sort of pilgrimage. I saw a dragonfly sparkle in the waning afternoon light and spoke the words out loud in an effort to make the impossible truth feel real.
He's dead.
It still didn't feel real. But it was. My father — my kind, compassionate, wise, silly, absent-minded dad — died two years ago today after COVID-19 left its mark in the form of congestive heart failure.
I told the dragonfly that evening at the lake. I wondered how two simple syllables could bear the weight of so much grief.
I wondered again at the cemetery, when I stood with my sisters and my husband and my cousin and my daughter and lifted his casket one final time.
My daughter spotted the dragonfly then; a golden flicker that darted around us and glowed in the light of the summer afternoon.
Grandpa sent it, she said.
We notice dragonflies more often now. The way their gauzy wings catch the light. They way they fly so softly and land so gently. The way they skitter and skim across the surface of the water, sparkling against its blue depths. The way everything about them shimmers and makes them feel like an illusion, a mirage created by some unseen power to send us a moment of magic.
We always remember him then.
Not, of course, that we ever forget. Grief doesn't disappear in two years. It can still hit with the force of an unexpected blow when a milestone happens and he's not here to witness it. My new job. My sister's call to the bar. My daughter's twelfth birthday, just yesterday. That he's not here to see his granddaughter turn into a teenager carries a fresh grief of its own.
But the grief is less heavy now. Its weight doesn't feel so unbearable.
I can savour the joy of the memories now more than the sadness. I can eat lemon meringue pie and jellybeans with a smile — not because I particularly like either one, but because Dad did, and my daughter insists upon having them in Grandpa's honour.
I can even laugh sometimes at the what-could-have-beens: What my daughter's cherished Grandpa would have thought of the slang of the skibidi-sigma-rizz generation. How his spontaneous song-and-dance numbers would have made his beloved granddaughter roll her eyes and hide in embarrassment. How she'd have delighted in showing him how to dance to proper music, as opposed to Mom's tragic Gen X imitation.
It will never stop being unfair that my father's life was cut shorter than it should have been. I will never stop wishing we had more time with him.
Grief will always be a part of me. It's here, now, as I sit in my backyard on a summer afternoon and think of the day two years ago when I got the phone call and I clung to my daughter and my husband and cried.
It will always catch me by surprise when it alights unexpectedly. But it lands more gently than it once did, hovering with a sort of soft shimmer and bringing with it a moment of light and grace.
The dragonfly flits away again. But I know it will return.
Julie MacLellan is the Surrey-White Rock bureau chief for Black Press Media.
