Picture The Matrix. And if you haven’t seen The Matrix, I can paint you a picture: long black trench coats, thin wire sunglasses, leather pants, black shirt, dark spiked hair, some… kind of sci-fi storyline. I’ve never seen The Matrix, so don’t hold me on the details, but I just know that it has something to do with the future. Now picture that dark spiked hair but replace it with a gray buzzcut. And replace the leather pants and black shirt with dad jeans and a polo or relaxed colored t-shirt. And replace the small sunglasses with wire-framed regular glasses. And don’t forget to add the quiet, insanely intimidating demeanor (to those who don’t understand him yet) of a man who only speaks when he thinks he can add something to the conversation or bring something out of someone else. Now you’ve got my dad, Mark Fleming.

For his occupation, he was an IT guy. He used to work for an insurance company, Verizon Wireless, and a few other places. But the Verizon was the most recent. It was the most attractive option to him because he was promised—in the long run—the ability to work from home. And this was almost twenty years before the pandemic. Since my mom was homeschooling me at the time, she and I (plus our three dogs and bird—yes, I was a bird kid) would be his makeshift co-workers. Loud, but it was home. Some spouses find the idea of both working from home to be nerve-wracking and awful, but they were giddy at the prospect.

He was an incredibly smart man. I was never old enough to be in really complicated math classes when he was alive, but he always tried helping my older sisters with their homework in geometry, algebra, etc. (he double majored in two different kinds of math in undergrad). I was lucky enough to only have to take College Algebra in college, which I completed and quickly sprinted as far away as I could from mathematics—I chose writing as my major. Suffice it to say, my dad was very very smart. Before he went to Huntington University in Indiana, he was accepted to West Point University. It’s a very selective military school, one that I haven’t done much digging into because military school sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. (I got yelled at in my face one time and broke into tears. If a sergeant yelled at me even from afar, I would for sure crumble.)

My dad was also just a really good dad. I know that not many people get to say that about their parents, and I am incredibly lucky and one of the few, so I don’t take that for granted. He and my mom met in a singing group at their college (Huntington) and were glued at the hip upon their first meeting. Fast forward 2 years later and they got married; 6 years after that, my sister Rachel was born; 3 years later, Taylor was born; and then 5 years later, I was born. My dad was the epitome of a girl dad. He was gentle and incredibly protective, and he saw our importance and worth. I just really wish that he was alive long enough for me to have a conversation with him that didn’t revolve around the new Hannah Montana show that was coming out or telling him excitedly how many spelling errors I found in the latest Cam Jansen novel. (They were absolutely filled with them, and my mom paid me a quarter per error that I found. Needless to say, I had found my side hustle at a young age.) But, despite the mediocrity of my daily discussion topics, he really seemed to love listening to what I had to say.

A few years after he died, he was all I could write about—any memories that I still had from him in my childhood, pictures of him and me, and particularly the last week with him when he went mute and barely blinked. Every day he kept getting skinnier, and the more painful it was to see him be able to do less and less. I think his spirit left him long before that last week of his life. He would sit in his and my mom’s bed, reading and rereading the Bible verses that my mom taped on their wall across from his spot. The one thing that I believe remained the entirety of those four months of his diagnosis, though, was his faith in God.

My journey with God as a kid was basically, “If my sisters are doing it, then so am I.” We went to church every Sunday, and I don’t remember a single weekend when I actually wanted to go. But, going to church was a family affair and a non-negotiable in our family. I had always felt like I was faking it until I made it in terms of having a relationship with God, and I was just hoping that one day the mystery and magic of it all would be real. As one can imagine, after my dad’s diagnosis with stage IV colon cancer, I dove into the hope and stance that the whole belief system wasn’t a farce. I needed it to be true. I was told from the get-go that he would be healed from cancer, so no matter what, no matter how skinny he got, no matter how jaundiced his skin looked from cancer metastasizing to his liver, God would heal him before he got all the way down to “dying.” So, I just didn’t even worry about the possibility that one day he wouldn’t be there anymore. We all believed that he would be healed because he believed in God and God loved Him, so as an over-trusting thirteen-year-old kid that I was, I accepted it as truth.

After he died, my entire belief system was thrown for a loop. He didn’t survive the cancer like we believed he would. I was told the classic sayings, “At least he’s not in pain anymore” or “It’s okay to be mad at God. He can take it.” Well, hopefully God could handle the arrows of absolute hatred I was shooting at Him, because God was on my shit list for many years. And, just as a side note: these are the most annoying things to say to people who are grieving. Just listen to them and be there for them. That’s all you need to do. This isn’t some redemptive tale of how I came back into my belief in God after all those years, because it’s not, and I didn’t. I don’t know where I stand spiritually, but, like someone on a podcast I listened to a few years ago said, “Isn’t it kind of exciting not to know?”

I didn’t grieve for a long time. I mean, I was thirteen, so I didn’t really understand how to go about the process healthily. I didn’t cry about it for a shockingly long time, and my brain and heart just closed off for a while. When I did start the “grieving” process—which I don’t think is something you can “successfully” get out of; it’s just life, and those people will always be important to you. You just participate and appreciate life more and more as time goes on—my outlet was poetry. You should be thankful that I have never posted my first drafts of poetry because those puppies were dark. I eventually got on antidepressants and my poetry can still sometimes be kind of dark, but they’re less dark just to be dark. I now consider my voice as a writer to be “Serious,” like my beloved Professor Gogan would say to me in my favorite class in undergrad: Poetry. We’re all a summation of what has happened to us, so I’ll never just not write about my dad. He was the kind of guy who would play basketball with my sister and me every night after dinner; he would stick up for my mom if I was mouthing off to her; he was our greyhound Goose’s favorite person; and from my Grandma’s numerous stories about his childhood, he was a well-loved son and brother. My dad sometimes dressed like he was in The Matrix and unintentionally (but probably also intentionally) scared boys off from dating my sisters, but he was such a sweet dad to have. He wrote my sisters and me prayers about what he hoped for our future, held my hand through the grocery store for probably longer than normal for my age, and always took our birthdays off of work to make sure we were celebrated and knew we were loved. He was the type of person who always thought through what he was about to say before he said it. You know that if he told you something, he meant it. And my dad said that he loved me and my family a lot.

Reagan Fleming