When a Daddy's girl loses her father

My sweet father has left me, at a time when I need him the most.

My father died on Tuesday.

Daddy, Gus, Augustine. The one man who seemed to “get me”, when no one else did… he’s gone. He was 75.

I knew our time together was coming to an end. Which is why I published this piece about his father, a minor chief of a royal Asante sword that was looted by the British, and my dad’s encouraging me to pursue justice.

Daddy taught me that if I wanted to do well in the world, I needed to read books and work hard. He taught me how to drive in a beat up 1982 black diesel Mercedes. He always said that true freedom was working for yourself one day. He told me to write books, to dream big… “to go up and up and up.”

Regular readers and followers of mine might know a bit about my dad from recent years, especially when I moved back to Texas in 2020 to be with my parents during the pandemic.

Then my father had a stroke in 2021. Beyond the threat of COVID, I knew the countdown clock on our time together had begun. I decided that instead of moving back to Washington. I would stay in Dallas and spend as much time with my dad as possible.

I posted on Twitter about watching hummingbirds with my dad from our porch. They will remember my viral tweet threads and my Washington Post article about the time my dad let some landscapers destroy my favorite fig tree in the courtyard, and how angry I was. So much so that I threatened to kill his favorite plant to get my point across. (I know, I’m a lot.)

Karen Attiah@KarenAttiah

My dad let the tree trimmers massacre the fig tree, my favorite tree in the whole world. I am livid. I need to walk this off

11:08 PM · Oct 16, 2020

---

69 Replies · 17 Reposts · 550 Likes

Though he wouldn’t admit it, he knew his health was failing. He went on a health food kick, only buying organic, trying to make his own kombucha. He and I would watch YouTube videos about soil chemistry to grow better food. I was training for my first Muay Thai fight, juggling practice sessions and weight cuts with spending time with him during his various hospitalizations. When he developed diabetes, I learned how to measure his blood sugar to give him his insulin shots. I was dieting to cut weight to step in the ring, while he had to completely restrict his diet in order to control his glucose. As the stroke impaired his mobility and motor skills, I would be his personal trainer… helping him to do small exercises with dumbbells and resistance bands.

He sipped his tea once. “You don’t belong to Mommy or me. We don’t own you. You belong to the universe. You just came through us.” It was one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me.

As long as my dad was around, I had some safety, his house in Dallas, a pit stop to refuel my engine in between life chapters and international exploits. After my Fulbright year in Ghana, I came home to Daddy’s house. After living in the Caribbean for a year, getting my first start in journalism in Curacao, I came back to Daddy’s house. After the Khashoggi murder and leaving the man I thought was the love of my life— I came right back to my father’s house. I told him months ago that I was fired from the Washington Post. Though I worried that it would make him sad and fearful for me, in his condition in the nursing home…. he was still my dad, who had good advice. “You will be okay. Everything will be fine.” I knew he believed in me.

Or maybe he was just trying to make me feel better.

“You need to hurry up and marry soon,” my father’s sister, my griveing aunt, said calling from Ghana. “Who is going to take care of you now?”

I don’t know. It’s a good—and devastating — question.

The universe that I supposedly belong to has been dealing me a lot of personal blows recently. I haven’t been knocked out, but social justice fighters can only take so many direct shots to the head— and damage to the heart.

And indeed, there is no special title for adults who lose their parents— there is no sympathetic status change for us. People who lose spouses are widows. Children who lose both parents are orphans. Adults who lose parents— well thats just being an adult, good luck, suck it up.

“Women like us need fathers like our dads”, one of my Tanzanian friends said. What she meant by women like “us” was that we are fighters, challengers, a little weird— the ones who lace up our gloves and become “digital gladiators”, scrapping in the arenas of truth, beauty, narrative, justice. We don’t really fit into the African cultures our fathers came from, but we also find ourselves raging against the systems in the countries they migrated to. We are hungry women, in that we not only want to experience everything the world has to offer, but we also know we can because our powerful dads have our back. They don’t try to force us to be anything but ourselves.

In dating, it means we aren’t content with being some ordinary man’s queen. We don’t settle for somebody’s son treating us anyhow. I never did, anyway. My father came to this country alone, not knowing the culture, worked to get to the best schools, and made sure I had the best education I could get. And I am supposed to settle for men who send low effort “wyd” texts? Am I supposed to settle for weaker men who don’t enjoy and take pride in my strength and zeal for life?

(kisses teeth) Msscheeww. Absolutely not. I don’t need men like that. I have my dad.

But now my Daddy is gone.

I went to view my father’s body. And I talked to him, told him I loved him. That he did a really, really good job. And then I was angry and scared. “How could you leave me here?! By myself???” This is the same terror and betrayal we feel as kids when our parents need to leave us at school or in day care for the first. I just want my dad to come pick me up and take me home.

My friend, who also lost her father six years ago, told me that daddy’s girls like us need to be careful about the void. We are now exposed, vulnerable in ways we’ve never known before. It is hard to find men who measure up to the image that we have built of our fathers. I fear what the pain of my dad’s loss will turn me into. I am angry that my father left me in the middle of a time when my questions about the world are getting me exiled from my institutional homes. If this is the universe taking care of me, it’s doing a really shitty job.

I’m old enough to know that the void will not be filled with prestige, shopping, going to the gym, money, food, sex, or social media likes. I see why people go to psychic mediums, desperate to connect with the people who have transitioned. I understand now why ancestor reverence is so prominent in many cultures— I want to believe that now my dad can protect me in deeper and more powerful ways on the other side, now that he is not trapped anymore in a failing body that was causing him pain and sadness.

I feel selfish and like a childish brat. I am not ready to accept that he has departed and left me here in this realm. My father was a fighter, but his body was tired. I told him when he was alive that he had done so much, that he had done enough for others. That he could rest.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel existentially, materially homeless without my daddy. That I feel purposeless. That the books I was writing, the Ghanaian identity I was exploring, the Twi language classes I was taking, the journalism I was doing, the ambition I had— all came because I wanted to make him proud. I know he would want me to keep going, whatever that looks like. He wanted me to keep teaching, to keep building Resistance Studies Series. He wanted me to do what I could to help other people. I know we will celebrate his journey, surrounded by friends, family, former patients, and so many people whom he helped.

But right now. I’m the little girl whose Daddy left her alone in a dark world on a sunny Tuesday morning. And that he won’t come back to get me.

And all I want is for my Daddy to come back.