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1:39am January 4, 2015
Anonymous asked: Hi, questions out of curiosity. Why do you call things dad shirts and dad hats?

My father died of cancer (so thoroughly metastasized they never found the exact source) recently.  I started wearing similar clothing to him a couple months before he died, because I felt like it made me feel closer to him even though I wouldn’t be able to travel to see him or even his burial (he didn’t want a funeral, just a quiet burial with my mother reading a short eulogy and a couple of my poems). Anyway, he loved that I was dressing like him and started sending me his own clothes to wear.  After he died, I got his entire collection of hats – hats meant a lot to my father so I was amazed and flattered that he’d send them to me.

So a dad shirt is a shirt that looks like the kind my dad habitually wore, or a shirt that actually belonged to my dad. And same with the dad hats.

Since he died (late October or early November, I can’t remember), I’ve been wearing his clothes every day as mourning clothes.  I haven’t been able to fully describe what this does for me, but whatever it does is pretty profound.  I’ll post on my tumblr when I do figure it out.  I’ve been trying to work it into a poem, but it may also come out in one of those posthumous letters I’ve written to my dad on my blog.  It’s not that I don’t know the reasons this is seriously important to me – almost like a religious ritual – it’s that I haven’t found the words to describe it yet.  It’s very simple, but very complex, at the same time, and I know that makes no sense whatsoever but there you are.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this