## What Gets Carried Forward
My father’s parents are both gone. His sister, Aunt June, is sixty-six. The people who knew him before he was a parent — who knew who he’d been before I arrived and gave him a new role to inhabit — are older now, fewer than they were.
What gets carried forward is what I have. The calls. The photographs. The will and its amendment. The text. The space program book with its particular detail about preparation and acceptance. The fern photograph that I can pull up on my phone anytime.
And the stories I tell, which are imperfect reconstructions of a person I knew well and also didn’t know fully, because you can’t know a person fully even after decades, because they’re a person and not a document.
He existed before I knew him. He had whole chapters that were finished before I was old enough to understand what I was watching. He made choices I don’t know about and had feelings I can only infer and was someone’s child before he was mine, in all the complicated ways that entails.
What I carry forward is my version of him. The engineer who dated his board game score tallies. The man who kept a birthday card for seven years. The father who paid attention to ferns and said something clumsy at Christmas and then drove to his attorney’s office and fixed what he could.
I hope what I carry forward is fair to him. That’s the best I can do — carry it as accurately as I can, with the evidence I have, keeping room for what I don’t know.