When your dad is dead, your best friend becomes a subgenre of music: 

Divorced-Dad-Rock. I’m talkin’ Animals by Nickleback, Cherry Pie by Warrant, and anything by Blue Oyster Cult. 

This event is unavoidable. In the same way it was unavoidable that you, as the first born daughter, were going to become a parent. Even before he was dead—whether or not you admit it in therapy—you knew you were raising him. It was a responsibility given to you because his mom was too busy raising her father. 

You didn’t have to accept the responsibility, but you did. It’s because you were tender and kind, and the rest of your family looked tired of trying. Possibly because you had some sort of savior complex, too. You (and I, at some point) were going to save the world, but we had to see if our fathers were salvageable first. 

When you decide to take on this task, you know it won’t be easy. You clamber into his pickup truck on the way home from school, and turn down his music. It’s Divorced-Dad-Rock, but he’s not divorced and it’s too loud for the ‘saving’ you have to make happen. Then you ask him about his day, and he grunts in response like the settling of an old, haunted house which shouldn’t have been inhabited for a long time now. 

Your mom calls. She says she’s working late, and he sighs louder than any metal-head could scream. Near the end of the call, you nudge him—your tiny hand gently asking for the attention of a statue. 

“Tell her you love her,” you say. 

He looks down at you with a placating smile. He laughs before his voice turns dead: “Love you.” He hangs up. 

You laugh too, making the entire thing into a joke. They don’t love each other. Not in the emotional anthem fashion of With Arms Wide Open by Creed, or the cathartic release of Here Without You by Nickelback. But, if you can plant the seed of love in his head, maybe you can trick him into meaning it. 

He turns up the music again. It’s Blurry by Puddle of Mudd. 

Everything’s so blurry and 

Everyone’s so fake and 

Everybody’s empty and 

Everything is so messed up 

This pattern drags on and on and on. 

One night your mom drops a glass plate on the ground. Nobody gets hurt, but you wish your dad had stepped in it, if only to later track his bloody footprints as he slams the front door

behind him. You can’t follow him. You don’t know if he’ll come back. You tell the door you love him. You cry. 

Everything’s so blurry and 

At parties your dad sits in a different room. He takes out his work laptop, slamming on each key: I D O N ’ T W A N T T O B E H E R E. Your family doesn’t say anything. He eats Christmas Eve dinner with them. He goes back to work. He won’t join in on the games. Your family doesn’t say anything. 

Everyone’s so fake and 

You spend an average of five nights a week from the ages of ten to fourteen unable to sleep. You’re always scared—of the dark, of the dark becoming light, of having to wake up and do more of your ‘saving’. You can’t face the truth, though. (You’re scared of him. But you love him, too.) 

Everybody’s empty and 

He starts getting sick. You don’t want to take care of him, but you need him to be alright. You love him, and you can’t take seeing him like that. It makes you sick. You’re sick. Then he’s dead. 

Everything is so messed up. 

It’s not quiet after he’s gone. Noises you used to run from turn to static in your mind—the perpetual push and pull of waves, washing your grief over your heart before receding back into guilt. You loved him, you really did. He was still your father, even when he was yelling. Even when he drowned out your voice by blasting the radio. Even when your ears felt like they might bleed. 

But how can you reconcile with his memory? There is no confronting the dead. The tactics of abrasion he taught you will do nothing to that gravemarker (it’s likely made of the same stone he was.) It does not budge. It does not listen well. 

In my professional opinion, the only thing to do next is to wallow for a minimum of three months. This is best completed in peace and quiet. 

And, when you feel ready—and I must iterate that this can be anywhere from one day to one-hundred years—I endorse your listening to Divorced-Dad-Rock. You might receive an immediate sense of catharsis from it; a new character trait, if you will. 

It is much more likely, however, that you will tune in and be immediately repelled by its inherently explicit, obnoxious, and aggressive nature. 

Turn it off if you like. Throw your listening apparatus across the room. Curse the world and your father and Nickelback. These are all fine. I only ask that you do not make a vow (if you are such a person who keeps their vows, promises, and swears) to never listen to it again. 

This is because one day you’ll be out and about somewhere, living your quiet life—perhaps in the grocery store or such—and a song like Back in Black by ACDC will play, and you’ll feel it. The weight of skin lifts, barbed-wire bones unravel, and you ascend. There will be a brief moment of panic (realizing you have a new urge for spontaneity, watching yourself be

crude and unashamed, etc), but it always passes. After all, you are all those things—crude in your primitive love, spontaneous with your kindness, angry against injustice, loud with your insecurity, unashamed in your intelligence—you just didn’t want to admit it before. Evading these traits becomes all-too futile. 

I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t make you like him, I promise. It’s actually good for you to keep listening—refreshes the soul and all that. 

Beware, however, that in a few months many people will not understand why this has become your favorite genre of music. 

That’s alright. That’s the point. 

Us girls with dead dads don’t listen to Divorced-Dad-Rock because it brings our dads back. It actually does the exact opposite. It lets us reclaim all that noise, all that pent up anger we let him get out on us. It tears down a sort of fragile condition that we were nurtured into and replaces it with boldness. I think it also makes us a little insufferable, helps us to practice taking up space in the confines of our car radios and headphones. 

It’s also the only invention that’s 100% guaranteed to work. 

Be insufferable. Be sharp. Listen to Divorced-Dad-Rock.