Chapter 2: Don't Forget To Tell Him About Me

Departures of Grief by Marial Leisge

Chapter 2: Don't Forget To Tell Him About Me

In 2018, my father passed away from cancer. For many, losing a parent is followed by mourning, sadness and the severance of a foundational person in your life. Personally, I use dissociation, detachment and compartmentalizing as ways to survive - and to carry on down my own road. 

It wasn’t until years later, in December 2025, I indulged in my first experience with a medium. The medium told me, “He says he’s sorry for leaving the way he did. He wants you to know no one could have saved him. All he really needed was love. And that would have been enough.” 

At this point, I was basically levitating above my own body. Then she added: “He wants you to stop hanging all those dirty clothes over your son’s bed. He says you should show your son photos of him instead.” 

And I spiraled. Fully. 

Because, earlier that year, I had my father’s old oil-stained jeans and torn-up shirts sewn into a tapestry that hung in Otto’s room. He wore the same five items for decades, each embroidered with sweat, dirt, paint and a lifetime of manual labor. And somehow my father - this present spirit - was now acknowledging something so deeply private, his dirty clothes… that hung over my son’s bed. 

That night, I tucked my son in longer than usual and stared at my father’s clothing tapestry hanging on the wall. I fought the urge to take it down because I felt I was being invited into something I had no interest in attending. It was a gesture too loud to ignore. One that asked me to hold steady with faith over fear and to keep digging - into the unknown, into myself, into something beyond my comfort zone. 

To keep going. 

When my dad passed, he did not have anything to give, and we silently did not expect to "inherit" anything.. But if you knew my father, you knew it crushed him to have only sentimental value to pass down. 

He was an extremely generous man, always giving more than he had. It was a blessing and a curse, especially for a blue-collar man: a general contractor who over-promised, worked beyond his own capacity and ended his career in devastating bankruptcy. In his final years, our family was forced to leave our childhood home, Stonegate Farm. 

I had always considered Stonegate my safe haven - a place I could return to when life got hard because my connection to the farm was made almost entirely of happy childhood memories. It was a warm blanket. Familiar. Pure. It was nature. 

I could not fathom the guilt my father must have carried, feeling responsible for that loss and for the grief it placed on all of our hearts. We are all doing our best, right? 

I joke with the people closest to me that my father uses my son as a spiritual channel to reach me. He would do something that complicated and dark while thinking it was funny, without understanding how twisted it might feel. There was a period when Otto wanted me to call him “Steve” - my father’s name. I had never spoken to him about my dad before.

I truly believe my father pointed me toward our new home on Jackson Ave. This is him trying, somehow, to give me back a piece of childhood: a space where my son can begin living a full life, free from the environmental burden we are leaving behind. A home where I can finally start talking about my father and help Otto understand that he exists - just not here on earth. 

Each chapter of this story carries a small collection of photographs. As I shuffled through the nostalgia, I realized those pictures serve more than one purpose. They offer you context for the story, but they are also pocket-sized opportunities for me to begin telling these same stories to my son. 

I don’t know what took me so long. Maybe it was because Otto struggled with communication. Maybe it was because I was scared and did not know how to begin. Maybe my father, who spent his life building houses for other people, knew that I would finally begin with one of my own.