A few hours after Levi Fishback died last month, at a nursing home in Kentucky, the funeral director called me. She needed to know whether the family wanted an open casket. What songs would Levi have wanted? What color flowers? Who should give the eulogies?
By now I should be used to being asked questions about my father that I don’t know the answers to. I spent the past four years as his medical proxy, the only family member responsible for handling the bills from the nursing home and overseeing his care. But I barely knew the man. I felt uncomfortable deciding whether the nurses should give him a flu shot every fall, let alone choosing what to put in his obituary. I needed to include photos, but I had only one: from my fourth or fifth birthday. I messaged his ex-wife and the stepdaughter he’d raised, along with my half brother’s two children, for more, and they delivered, sending photos of my dad—smiling widely in a suit and tie—alongside them at graduations and family parties. I didn’t know that he’d had that much joy inside of him.
My memories of my dad are like a few scatterplots on the graph of my life. He had lived right across town from me in Lexington, Kentucky, but he would go months without visiting me. From the ages of 10 to 14, I don’t think I saw him a single time. He had his own family—his wife, his stepdaughter, and his son from a previous relationship. When he and his wife got married, his son was the ring bearer and her daughter was the flower girl. I wasn’t a flower girl at the wedding. I didn’t go to the wedding. I didn’t even know about the wedding. They had a piano in their living room that his stepdaughter played. She is a year older than me and went to a rival high school. I would see her sometimes—she was a cheerleader, and she had all the name-brand clothes that the pretty, popular girls wore…