A few months ago, I came across a journaling prompt encouraging me to reflect on my favorite piece of furniture in my childhood home. How odd, I thought, but I was intrigued. As a child, my world had been outside, and I’m not sure I had ever really given our furniture a second thought. Yet, sitting in front of a blank laptop screen, decades later, it came to me. My favorite piece of furniture had been my dad’s big, comfy, well-used and loved TV chair. More specifically, the right armrest of it, snuggly touching our heavy, wooden 80s-coffee table. Its top had been slightly higher than the armrest and created the perfect little seat between dad and table. This is how we had spent family TV time. My mom and brother stretched out on either side of the sectional, and my dad and I immensely content in the big, old couch chair. His chuckle whenever I had settled right next to him is a sound I’ll remember forever. Even with other space available, I would always prefer the peaceful comfort of my dad’s shoulder, until the day it had become physically impossible to fit onto the then perfectly indented right armrest. Eventually, the chair was replaced by a more modern, sleeker leather model, ending the era of a now precious core memory.

So, you see, it was obviously never about the piece of furniture itself, but about the memories it held. My dad passed away somewhat suddenly from cancer, or complications thereof, almost seven years ago at the age of sixty-six. Although having had experienced family loss up until then and having a very detached, mature idea of life and death, losing my dad before his time changed me as a person. Picture me desperately trying to glue together shattered pieces of myself in the same order, but without the help of instructions. The outcome just wasn’t quite the same. Pieces of carefreeness were missing, and colors were muted somehow. The pieces of me that were like him lost their mirror, and it took losing him and the soul-crushing nonreciprocity of mutual energy to realize just how much of me is him. Grief is a curious thing. After all these years, I’m still not firmly anchored in the acceptance stage of it, but I have learned how to compactly vacuum-seal and carry a bundle of grief as big as his unconditional love, as big as life itself.

My dad is the reason why I wear my heart on my sleeve, why I treat everyone with the same respect, why I passionately yell at the TV during soccer matches, why I rescue and want to befriend all animals, why I devour books and appreciate the magic of words, why I like walnut ice-cream, and why I love the breathtaking beauty and inexplicable wonders of this world. Its vastness, its unknowns, and its endless horizons. His soul was at home in the tiny details of nature, the open sea, the smell of a horse barn, golden fields of barley ready to harvest, or the never-ending highway. I can’t tell you how many nature documentaries we had watched from the safety of our TV chair, our little cosmos of curiosity and dreams. It’s a feeling that’s with me on every road trip, every time another wild critter visits me, every time I scan a landscape too marvelous to be true, and every morning my children are in awe of the sky’s colors. It’s how my dad remains, and it’s soothingly beautiful. He had always been so genuinely excited for every new chapter I embarked on, clapping loudest for his equally free-spirited birdie that flew the nest far and wide.

Needless to say, I think I will never again underestimate the monumental domino effect a seemingly simple or odd-sounding journaling prompt can have on the brain. Like a scene out of Inception, I sat in front of a blinking cursor on an empty document screen, at present time, imagining the specific layout and setup of my childhood home. I walked through each room, until I vividly saw the back of a big, upholstered TV chair cradling a dad and his little girl, relaxed faces illuminated by a screen, and I let my heart rest for a while.