Sniffler

My new father shows up at the park with a withered sunflower.

“It’s all I could afford at the flower shop,” he apologizes.

It’s not a promising start. He obviously sat on it accidentally, too.

“Did you even read my profile?” I demand.

“You like long walks. And scenic drives. And flowers,” he adds, proud of himself for remembering all these things. “We can go anywhere, drive anywhere you want.”

His car is parked across the street. A gray Ford with cord wrapped around the bumper and a plastic bag taped to a broken window because he ‘hasn’t gotten around to fixing it since the crash.’

I imagine us swerving around a semi, tires squealing over the edge, car junk littering the coast line.

I’m not going on any long drives in that car, least of all down Highway 1.

He holds up his hands.

“Hey, that’s fine.”

It isn’t fine, not at all. He walks away, throwing the sunflower into a garbage can.

I don’t want to care, but I’ve been alone ever since my last father choked on a chicken bone at KFC and died in the restaurant.

If they can call it a restaurant.

But there’s a nickname for people like me on Adopt-a-Parent.

Snifflers.

I’ve seen their scarring profiles. The mournful poses. The bad poetry. They take up crochet and listen to indie bands.

No one wants a Sniffler.

They’re chronically sad, and lethargic, and basically doomed to be alone.

According to my profile, I’m supposed to be healing. Taking charge of my life again.

I speak with exclamation marks! I greet the day with a smile! I sing in my car! I do goat yoga! Because I live life to the fullest! Every day! I am super fun and positive!

My new father and I drive to the beach. We do not die. Not then, anyway.

We walk in silence down the boardwalk and stare at seagulls and joggers and surfers. It isn’t relaxing like it’s supposed to be and the silence is awkward and none of us knows what to say.

Maybe it will get better in time.

Depending on how much time we have.

“How about a Matcha Latte!” I exclaim.

My new father doesn’t understand the concept of whip cream.

“And why is it green? What’s wrong with plain old black coffee?” he grumbles. “What’s wrong with people these days?”

I don’t know where to begin. So that’s at least one thing we have in common.

My new father looks at me like he sees through my charade. “Are you angry all the time, too?”

I’ve been angry all the time for a long time. But if this is a test, I don’t intend to fail.

Besides, the membership is expensive and I already work two jobs.

I won’t make the same mistake I made with my second father.

The neediness, the crying. The snotty kind.

I was in a bad place back then.

“Clean yourself up,” he had reprimanded. He was looking for someone to watch the game with, someone to go fishing with, this wasn’t what he ordered. Even though I rattled off stuff like ‘tackle’ and ‘bait’ to impress him, terms I had read up on the internet.

It didn’t work. He left me a two star rating.

It’s taken me a while to recover my reputation.

I’ve been through a lot of fathers and none come close to the original. But if I’m not careful, I’ll start to sound like a Sniffler.

My new father invites me over for a home cooked meal.

His wife, Brenda, watches a lot of the food network and cooks dishes with old world names like ‘casserole’ and ‘meatloaf’.

“It’s delicious,” I lie.

Their house is something out of a sixties sitcom; floral wallpaper, pink carpeting, and shelves jammed with plates “from our wedding”. There are random pieces of furniture everywhere. They’d take me on a tour, but they “haven’t gotten around to organizing”.

Wedged in-between all the stuff, there’s a framed photo of them next to a little boy in overalls.

“Our son Walter,” my new father explains.

I don’t ask what happened to him. I’ve heard enough sad stories.

Adopt-a-Parent holds a circle every month. They check in on our progress. They give us a ‘sharing space’ to talk about our feelings and complain, but mostly they want testimonials.

I never have anything to say, but still I show up because the food is catered from my favorite Indian-Vietnamese-Jamaican-fusion restaurant.

As usual, the Snifflers loiter in the back of the room, moodily sipping cocktails and muttering about their infirmities. Others, the five-stars, take to the stage and brag about how great they’re doing, how well they’re getting along with their new parent. They laugh at their own inside jokes.

“Harry just gets me, you know?”

I smile and affirm because I am engaging! I am a participator!

A Sniffler raises his hand. “My friends just don’t understand. Why are you always hanging out with this random old guy? They think it’s weird.”

The Founder speaks up. “This is your journey, not theirs. You do you. Whatever you need to survive. When you’re grieving, there is no such thing as Weird.”

If only that were true.

But everyone nods in agreement because it’s exactly what they want to hear.

My new father and I drive to the beach.

We walk in silence down the boardwalk and stare at seagulls and joggers.

I start to notice more details about him, like how he walks with a limp and how his coat is covered in dog hair even though he doesn’t own a dog.

I think about the guy at the Adopt-a-Parent circle with the dad called Harry. The Harry who ‘just gets him’.

I wonder if that will ever be me, if that will ever be us, if anyone will ever ‘get’ me ever again.

“How about one of those green coffees?” my new father suggests.

He’s trying.

But I’m not in the mood today. Today I feel like a Sniffler.

“What happened to Walter?” I ask.

My new father looks suspicious at my sudden curiosity about his son. I hope he doesn’t see the desperation in my eyes, the wanting, like a junkie needing a fix of sadness.

“One day he was there, next he wasn’t,” he says simply.

“Isn’t that everyone?” I reply glumly.

He doesn’t deny it.

I go into hibernation mode and it feels like home.

Old sweaters. Blackout curtains. Showering feels like a waste of time. I listen to as many indie bands as I can stand and reflect on my suffering in true Sniffler fashion. My grief crawls out of crevices and worms its way into song lyrics and reprimands me for neglecting it for so long.

No one calls or knocks on the door and I’m pretty sure I’ve been forgotten, erased, that my existence is uninteresting to the world. I start to wonder if I exist at all. I’m tempted to order takeout just to see a human face, or to call up a random number so I can hear a living voice on the line.

Days later, I finally emerge from my front door.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe an apocalyptic wasteland, the ashen vestiges of a Blitzkrieg or a frozen tundra of an ice age. Something to mark the passage of time, to excuse humanity for abandoning me.

But everything looks idyllically untouched. The cars are driving by. People are riding bicycles. The dogs are barking. The sky is still blue. Nothing has changed and no one cares.

Except.

There’s a brown paper bag on the doorstep, my name clumsily written on the front with a sharpie.

I look inside.

Meatloaf.

It’s a little moldy, but still edible if I scrape off the edges.

My new father and I walk down the beach. We stare at the surfers and the seagulls.

He still doesn’t understand Matcha Latte and I still despise meatloaf and we both pretend there’s nothing we enjoy more.

We still don’t talk. Unlike me, he is not afraid of silence. Unlike me, he isn’t afraid of where it will take him.

Some day, I don’t know when, the silence isn’t awkward anymore.

It just is.

He will never be ‘Harry who gets me’ and I will never be Walter, but we are resigned. Resignation is part of grief, too. A new chapter or a stepping stone or insert-zen-metaphor, whatever you want to call it.

Apparently it’s better than being angry all the time.

I think. I don’t know, I heard it somewhere. Probably in the Adopt-a-Parent FAQ but don’t quote me on it.

We can’t all be five star ratings, but at least we’re trying.

Anna Koltes is a Germerican based out of Chicago. She enjoys writing dark humor and talking about writing with her writing group.