In Anne Lamott's book, Traveling Mercies, there is a chapter entitled Dad. I come back to the words she has written often this time of year, "It's so different having a living father who loves you, even someone complex and imperfect. After your father dies, defeat becomes pretty defeating. When he's still alive, there are setbacks and heartbreak, but you're still the apple of someone's eye." I think I've come to realize that more than ever this year. I've graduated. I've moved away from home. Soon I'll be a grown-up in the truest sense of the word, someone with a job and a place of her own. But still, the thing I want more than anything else is my Dad. No matter what others have to say, their words pale when I consider the possibility of his.

Pages later Anne says, "And right then, as brightly as electricity lights up the night sky, I understood that the man I was calling for could never ever come back. Because I understood that the man I was calling for was dead." She goes on to describe the terrible accompanying feelings, the countless tears and how she wished to call out to anyone who could hear that her father had just died. And then to her dismay, she realizes her father had died 20 years earlier, and she says, "For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return." And in that moment, twenty years of longing ends, "I handed over my hope and belief that I did not have to have a dead father."

Eight years has nothing on twenty, but it's still more than a third of my life. Every once in a while, I come to the shocking realization that if I go home, my dad won't be sitting outside the house waiting for me. And in those moments, indescribable pain washes over me and I come to understand what Anne means when she says it feels as if her father had just died, 20 years later. And then I do what she did. But you'll have to read the book if you want to know what that is.