My Dad Died and All I Got Was This Playlist

TW: Parent Loss

Let’s just go ahead and start this off with two things.

1. I have needed to write this piece for a long time, but hadn’t felt ready to. This is a piece about parent loss and grief. I go into details about the extent of my father’s dying journey and its impact on me. This piece is messy and sad, so if you are uncomfortable with the topic of dying (specifically, dying from terminal cancer) or other people’s grief, I love you, walk away. 

2. This is a disclaimer to snooty music people: the songs I mention in the Dead Dad Playlist are not explicitly about people who have dead dads. A lot of lyrics that resonated with me were ones that coincide with the feeling of loss. Don’t be that guy in the comments who says “ACTUALLY, this song is about a break up!”. I know, I don’t care, if you’re gonna act like that, walk away. 

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If I’m going to do anything, it’s make a playlist. Every holiday, birthday, road trip gathering - you name it, and I’ll make a playlist. We’re going to run a race? I’ve got us on the music front. Your cousin’s sister’s other cousin has a Bumble date tonight and needs amping up? I’m sure I have a picture saved that would be perfect for the playlist cover. I have legitimately made playlists for bachelorette parties that I did not attend. I am Playlist Friend.

On New Year’s Day, 2024 (what a fucking year), I saw a trend where you create a playlist and each day you add a new song that is relevant to that day. For the first time in my life I actually felt pretty confident that I would accomplish a new years resolution. 

Y’all, I loved that fucking playlist. I loved sitting down each day and thinking about what happened that day. I loved the challenge of trying to assign a track to it. As someone who liked the idea of diary writing but was ultimately too lazy to commit, the daily moments of reflection as I picked my song felt like a good substitute. 

When my dad died, I was in the car, listening to one of my eight million playlists. My husband and I had gotten the call an hour before that we needed to drive back to Pennsylvania, but no one knew exactly when he would pass to the other side. We had packed bags (because we didn’t know how long we would be away), loosely cleaned the house for the emergency cat sitters, and dashed out. 

When my sister’s wife’s phone call interrupted the music, I knew we had lost him. When she hung up, my husband squeezed my hand and said something I don’t remember. The only thought in my brain was, “what is my song going to be today?”

One popped into my brain, and in that instant I felt my life 180. A pitying voice rang through my head, “we aren’t doing that anymore”.

Track 1: All Falls Down - Lizzy McAlpine

/I can’t stop the time from moving/ And I can never get it back/

Track 2: Garden Song - Phoebe Bridgers 

/The doctor put her hands over my liver/ She told me my resentment’s getting smaller/

My dad and I usually didn’t get along. He was the reason my parents’ divorced (due to all the cheating my dad did). I hated my (now ex) step mom (due to her being his mistress, and also a huge bitch). He had expressed frequent disappointment in my interest in visual art as a career (because he thought I was wasting my potential in engineering of all things -- I am very bad at math so where he got this from I have no idea). I very often hid large aspects of my life from him out of fear of scrutiny, and spent a large part of my high school years hardly speaking to him at all. 

This feels like a difficult thing to explain on the internet, where issues are so often organized in a very black and white way. I fear that people will read the above paragraph and assume that I should be happy that my dad passed because our relationship was strained. My dad loved me. Despite the fact that for parts of my life, I assumed he did not. I had told myself that there would be time for us to fix our relationship. There was not.

When my dad passed away, he was barely 120 lbs and was confined to his bed. Cancer brought him chronic pain that he refused to take medication for because he thought it was making him see things. He was scared, and aware that this shouldn’t be happening to someone at 59 years old. Somedays, I was his daughter who he loved. Other days, a stranger who he thought was trying to kill him. Often, he would be curled into a fetal position, whimpering through the pain of cancer spreading through his bones

I can’t speak for everyone with a strained parent relationship, but when I looked at him - a skeleton of the person he was - there was no way I could hold any resentment. You simply can’t look at someone enduring so much suffering and think about the times they wronged you. My mom had told me once that in times like this, nearly everything became forgivable, and she was right. 

After his body was taken out of the house, and after several mourning family members had left. I found a drawer full of every playbill of every play I had participated in, every school photo, every report card. He kept keychains with my name on them and artwork I had made in elementary school. The subsequent grief was an unstoppable wave that knocked the air out of my lungs.

I never called him unless it was to plan the holidays, I saw him less than 10 times in a calendar year. There would be no fixing of our relationship, there would be no moment of understanding and growth, only a cliffhanger and a lifetime of what if. What if I had said something before cancer ate his brain? What if he died thinking I hated him? What if, what if, what if. 

Tack 3: Francis Forever - Mitski

/I don’t know what to do without you/ I don’t know where to put my hands/ I’ve been trying to lay my head down/ but I’m writing this at 3am/

/I miss you more than anything/

Track 4: Teenage Dream - Olivia Rodrigo

/Oh, they all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow/ Yeah, they all say that it gets better, it gets better, but what if I don’t?/

The week my dad found out that he had 6 months left to live (jokes on him, he was dead 3 weeks later), he called me. At the time, I was on my honeymoon out of the country with no cell service, so I never got a notification of the call. 

It wasn’t until the day after he died that I noticed it floating in the voicemail box. The message was simple, just asking me to call him back with an “I love you at the end”.

I called him back. He didn’t answer. 

I called again, but he didn't answer again. Because, everyone say it with me -- He’s dead!

I listened to the voicemail again and felt like I was going to throw up all over my comforter. As my husband held me while I scream-cried, I thought, “oh my god, this will feel this way forever. It will always be this painful, there will never be a way out of this. I will never be happy again. How can I be happy when people die and leave you forever?”

Reader, it is still this painful. I think this is a concept that grieving people really understand and not-grieving people simply do not (speaking as someone who was not a grieving person a few months ago). I’m sure that people in my life look at me and see someone who is getting better--and in some ways I am. I stopped seeing his dead body whenever I closed my eyes. I don’t have nightmares as frequently. I put on my shoes, go to work, and laugh with my friends. But I think about my dad everyday, and the loss is still a wet sucking hole in my chest. I still cry on my commute and make sure my eyes don’t look red before I walk in the building. 

I’m sure that in the future, there will be a day that goes by where I don’t think about it but even then, I know there will be days where I do, and it will hurt every single time. My hope is that someday, the hurt will stop feeling like being punched in the gut. I look forward to the day it becomes a dull ache, a “I really miss him”, a “wish you were here”. 

Track 5: Interlude: I’m not Angry Anymore - Paramore

/I’m not angry anymore/ Well, sometimes I am/

Your loved ones expect you to be sad, and the grief books tell you you’re going to be sad, and everyone tells you how sorry they are that you have to deal with something SOOO SAD. And, they’re right. You will be soul-crushingly sad! But, if you’re like me, you might also be pissed. 

My dad died of cancer at 59 years old, seriously? What the fuck is that about! Where is the fairness in him living half of a life? How could I possibly be at peace with him passing when his life was cut brutally short? 

I’m angry at him for smoking, even though we don’t know if that was the cause of anything, I just need something to blame. I’m angry at his family, who for some reason thinks it’s a very chill, normal thing to tell me that I’m going to get cancer someday too (sidenote, don’t do this???). I’m angry because while other people get to leave sad things on his facebook profile and be a guest at the funeral and grieve in peace I have to sell his house and settle his bills and distribute the estate. I’m angry because his mom told me about how much pain he was in, and how he wanted to kill himself, and how she’s the real victim here. I’m angry because people ask me for things and I have absolutely nothing in me left to give. I’m angry because I feel like I see him in the afterlife cursing my name because I’m not selling his shit in a way he would approve of (well maybe you should have left more specific instructions, dad). 

There is no right way to mourn a person, but you will always feel like you’re doing it wrong. I can’t say I’m angry at my dad without sounding like a Huge Gaping Asshole, but I am (as previously stated) angry. 

If people had catchphrases, one of mine would be “are you fucking kidding me” and the other (more relevant) one would be “multiple things can be true at once”. You can love and feel grief, and you can also be really angry at the situation you’ve been thrown into. I love my dad, and I’m pissed that he’s dead. Sometimes that anger is directed at him, but it typically shows up when I think about the dominos that have been set in motion after he passed. I have had no time to mourn, because my dead father is a part time job I never applied for. After the anger subsides, I mumble an apology to the universe. 

If it makes you feel any better about me being a terrible person who is pissed at my dad who died in a very painful, awful way -- the man knew I was a bitch. I like to think he’s somewhere laughing. 

Track 6: How Did it End? - Taylor Swift

/Lost the game of chance, what are the chances?/

/Say it once again with feeling/ How the death rattle breathing/ silenced as the soul was leaving/ The deflation of our dreaming/ Leaving me bereft and reeling/ My beloved ghost and me/ Sitting in a tree/ D-Y-I-N-G/

When my dad was first diagnosed with Leukemia 10 years ago, he was given 6 weeks to live. 

How about those odds?

Track 7: American Pie - Don McLean

/Singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die”/

Even when I wouldn’t speak to my dad, we always found a way to bond over music. I remember being slumped in the passengers’ seat one day, after he had picked me up from school to take me to his house for the weekend. I hadn’t said much of anything to him, but when American Pie drifted through the speakers, I perked up, rising out of teenage gloom to the sounds of Don McLean mourning The Music. I’d been working on memorizing the words, and started mumble singing along. He sang along with me, and both of our voices grew louder with each repetition of the chorus. 

20 years in the future, I squeezed my husband’s hand in the passenger seat and thought about my 2024 playlist to avoid thinking about how I was driving to see my father’s corpse. Grief ran her long, ugly ass fingernail along my heart and I thought about Don McLean, and my father, and a moment when two people who never quite got along sang together with the windows down. 

I still can’t listen to it, the good memories are the ones that hurt the most. I never continued my 2024 playlist either, it got replaced by this one. The songs that make me feel when all I want to feel is nothing. The comfort and catharsis of knowing that someone out there has also lost something, and that they’ve lived through it. I hope that if you’re out there grieving, you know that you're not alone. If you want me to, I’ll help you make a playlist about it. It could be fun. I bet I can find the perfect playlist cover photo.