There are books about fathers. There are songs about fathers (my favorite is “Daddy’s Little Girl” by Frankie J). There are little ceramic plaques sold in grocery-store floral departments that say things about angels and heaven and how fathers never really leave us. There are repasses, but we called them comidas. There are comidas for everyyything. And there are recalentados, many. There are foil trays, dozens of them, brought by every tia and tio you could possibly think of (and then some). There are Crockpots, ollas, and cazuelas simmering pozole, rice, and birria, and there are gigantic plastic tubs packed with ice, filled to the BRIM with Caprisuns, Coco Colas, Sprite, and Squirt for the kids, Coronas and Modelos for adults. Food is what heals. Alcohol is what makes us eat more.

When my dad died, it was nothing like this. I didn’t hear the constant opening and closing of the refrigerator door, cabinet door, oven door, or any form of door. Not even the soft click of Tupperware lids being peeled back. Nobody to cool my fever of grief with a hot-as-hell bowl of caldo. I didn’t watch people fill their plates, but I did watch them fill their cups.

***

Did you know Frankie J’s full name is Francisco Javier Bautista Jr? I’ve been a fan of Kumbia Kings since 2007, but I didn’t discover his full name until after a quick google search when I was depressed in 7th grade and really missed my dad. “Mi Gente” by Kumbia Kings went triple platinum in my home, especially from Friday-Sunday. Those were family party days, carne asadas, kickbacks, cookouts, everything under the sun that involved family, food, drinks, and music. My dad loved to walk around with his chunky video camera and burn them on CDs for us to eventually see and have when we were older.

I was not one to emotionally attach myself to an individual from a big music group, but Frankie J did his big one with “Daddy’s Little Girl.” I was a clinically depressed and suicidal teenager with an untreated mood disorder and daddy issues, so you can imagine the emotional attachment I had to this song specifically. No one understood me more than Frankie J. Oh, and those really sad montage videos of soldiers who didn’t survive in the military with “Heaven” by Bryan Adams playing in the background. My dad wasn’t in the military nor was he dead (yet), but I loved sad videos, what can I say?

***

I could hear the tens of nurses and doctors scuffing the floors of their linoleum floors with their non-slip shoes. Scuffing. Scuffing. Scuffing. A doctor of some sort–maybe his Nephrologist, or Cardiologist, or Pulmonologist, or some -ologist–was almost scolding me on the other side of the line to choose. Do-Not-Resuscitate order or lifelong care for a man I only now knew through memories, photographs, and short-lived letters from prison.

“You need to pick now, Samantha,” she rushed me. “He is actively dying as I am speaking to you. We need to know now whether you want us…” I stopped her.

“Do not resuscitate.”

I did it. I killed my father then and there on a Thursday in May, and I have yet to forgive myself. Okay, well technically I didn’t kill him, and I know this, but the psychological pain those three words gave me has yet to be put past me. I sat the rest of the car ride to the hospital in silent tears, wondering what my dad’s face would look like when I arrived. I imagined he would look pale, cold, dead, really dead. The nurses tidied up his room and emptied everything short of his body and bed. Every loud machine that once kept his body functioning was gone. He was cold. I was right, and he knew the satisfaction I felt being right. He knew because I was his daughter. His daughter, his sad lonely helpless daughter laying on his chest with enough tears to make an eighth ocean.

You know how scientists say people’s lives flash before their eyes before they die? Laying on my dad’s chest felt like that, except my life, our lives together, flashed before my eyes. I assumed I would die with him, and I was ready to go with him to meet our maker.

There is a portion in “Daddy’s Little Girl” that says, “Can’t you see how much I need you? Daddy, daddy don’t leave. Mommy’s saying things she don’t mean. She don’t know what she’s talking about.” The younger version of me was shouting, screaming, pleading with me to take it back. She was bargaining with God and begging her father’s soul to stay intact until I could take back my words. I didn’t, and I wish I had just to avoid shattering her world all over again. This time, with the blood on my own hands.

***

I remember my dad taking me to my very first Ringling Bros. Circus at Staples Center, back when it used to be Staples Center. I loved to watch and listen to the pretty elephants with their loud trumpet trunks, and the motorcyclists revving their wheels in “the globe of death.” I remember the time he saved money to take our family to Universal Studios Citywalk, and how often he would say we should come back for the Christmas festivities. My dad was also the first person to introduce me to Elmo– the version of Elmo that worked on Hollywood Boulevard in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre, and who probably worked another shitty part-time job trying to make ends meet during an economic crisis. I also remember my first Christmas without him. I wrote my dad a letter on a Bugs Bunny Christmas card that had a green metallic background:

Dear Papi,

I’m so sorry that you can’t spend Christmas with me because you’re in jail but I hope I see you soon. I miss you and I love you.

Merry Christmas!!!

Love,

Sammy

He was never getting that letter, and, in fact, he never got that letter. I did think it was better than my sister’s Christmas card with nothing but colorful scribbles and doodles. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the prison thing on his Christmas card.

***

I didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked with my papi’s dead body. This was partially because I was so angry. I was angry with him for messing up his life enough to be incarcerated, as if it wasn’t the biggest Mexican-American stereotype that my grandmother worked tirelessly to avoid. She immigrated from Michoacán to Los Ángeles for him to spend years of his adulthood incarcerated and eventually die a similar painful death. My grandmother was everything to my dad. I think once she died he sort of lost all hope for himself, and slightly wished he would die soon just to be with her. Hoping he would see me again before he met death is what kept him going. I was angry with him for leaving me as a child, and the child version of me was still angry, too. I was angry with him for making one decision that ended up inflicting years of pain, deceit, dishonesty, and trauma within my family. I was just so angry.

I left the hospital with my head tilted down in tears and regret with two orange and white patterned two-pocket folders given to me by the hospital bereavement officer and another by the hospital social worker. I was empty. I needed to eat. An Original Tommy’s burger with a side of chili cheese fries and a large Coke. Papi’s favorite.

***

A young girl, probably no more than five or six years old is speaking to her father as she chases him to the door, through Frankie J’s voice of course. She says, “Father, listen. Tell him that he’s got a home and he don’t have to go. Father, save him. I would do anything in return. I’ll clean my room, try hard in school. I’ll be good, I promise you.”

I felt particularly lonely at night. Nighttime was when I got the most phone calls about updates on my dad’s condition. Since he was dead, the phone calls ceased. You would think I would sleep through the night better, but I couldn’t. It was cold and lonely. Maybe I was meant to feel like this because my dad died cold and lonely. My innermost child would be reminded of the nights she cried out to God, La Virgen de Guadalupe, the stars. Anyone who would listen to her voice begging, pleading for her papi to come home. She made promises, but the thing she didn’t understand is that the person you make a promise to also has to agree that said promise is sufficient enough to redeem their desired outcome. It wasn’t enough to clean my room or try hard in school. Maybe that’s why he died. Did I kill my dad?

***

Papi’s funeral was sad, as was every funeral I attended since childhood. Most of those funerals were on my mom’s side. My maternal great-grandmother’s death, Nana we called her, was life altering. She developed dementia and eventually Alzheimer’s, which wasn’t surprising given her age, our family’s health history, and her zipcode, but it was life altering nonetheless. My maternal grandmother had congestive heart failure, developed pneumonia, and eventually died of pulmonary edema. I was in middle school when she died. The remaining funerals were gang-related deaths that I’ve shared intimately with those closest to me. You could imagine the target on my back had I named names.

Most of the people in attendance at papi’s funeral were his friends from back in the day, some current friends, and tons of lady friends, including the woman whose name he had tatted on his forearm. They all said the same things to me:

“Your papi always talked about you mija.”

“He loved you more than anything in the world.”

“Your dad was the love of my life.”

“Your dad is the love of my life.”

“Your papi talked about visiting you in San Francisco and spending time out there with you right before he died.”

The last one gets me, everytime. I didn’t live in San Francisco, I lived in Oakland, but papi loved to brag about me to everyone, and everyone knew San Francisco. But people from the hood knew Oakland, too, so the people who got it, got it. The others didn’t. I also thought it was quite funny that these women who I just met are confessing their undying love for my father to me as we are crying over his body. They still reach out from time to time.

There was a statement in particular that made me quite angry amidst all my sadness.

“Your dad gave me his Bible before he died,” a woman named Veronica tearily said to me.

She opened it and inside were petals from the flowers she gifted him. He got his flowers before he died. She made sure of it. Yet, I was furious. He was sick, and he knew he was sick, and he didn’t tell me. He never said a word. He said he was healing. He lied and lied and lied to me over and over again. I could feel my face run red and the lump of pain in my throat trying not to scream at everyone to get the fuck out of the funeral home.

Before this, I knew within his days at the hospital that he knew he was sick before he was even admitted. Little by little I gathered pieces of his story from his friends, and, from what I gathered, he attempted to lay his ducks in a row. He reconnected with me, gave a few of his things to friends, and kept his mouth shut about the medications he wasn’t taking to remedy his diabetes. Exactly like my abuela. This is when I got to visually see the cycle–the generational cycle of trauma. I heard my father die, and my father discovered his mother’s lifeless body in our childhood home, and she discovered her mother’s body in her home, and her mother’s mother saw her mother die. There it was. Clear as day. Generational trauma. There is something deeply disturbing about witnessing the cycle while realizing you are becoming part of it, and you will be swallowed whole if you do not fight your way out.

Though I already knew of my dad’s Bible and the flowers and Veronica (because Veronica told me), I was still infuriated when she pulled the Bible from her purse and showed me the flowers. Roses. His favorite. I couldn’t bear to be reminded at his own funeral that he knew he was sick and retraumatized me in the process. I didn’t scream or shout or tell anyone to get the fuck out of the funeral home, but god would it have felt amazing.

The remainder of the funeral was my reading of the eulogy followed by friends speaking of memories from back in the day. I ate Tommy’s after my dad’s funeral. A perfect way to end a traumatizing day.

***

Papi’s body now sits in ashes on my homemade altar inside a plastic bag, plopped inside a plastic box-like urn gifted graciously to me by the funeral home. On it is a large sticker with the funeral home’s information and my dad’s name in bold Arial font at the top. His body has been dealt with. What am I to do with my father’s ashes now? Spread them in the waters of Long Beach City beach? Papi loved Summertime In The LBC by Dove Shack– “Summertime in the LBC. Now we are all in one to the west side going on, indo smoke,” he’d sing. Maybe I could spread his ashes by the train tracks in Watts? He would carry me above the black aluminum fence of our house and we would watch the Metro A line pass by on its way to the 103rd St / Watts Towers station. We did this everyday. Better yet, should I spread his ashes near Watts Towers? Is that even legal? He never stopped talking about those towers, and I loved them as much as he did.

***

I must share the ending of Frankie J’s exceptionally, and personally life altering, song that defined my childhood and adolescence. He pleads, “There, open his eyes. Need a little more time to tell him that I love him more than anything in the world.” I didn’t know that a song I held so dearly would reflect my actual life years later. There was a point in papi’s hospitalization where a doctor asked me to speak to him loudly while she rubbed his sternum to wake him up. He wasn’t responsive, but I begged him to open his eyes for me; to ignore everything and everyone else and listen to only my voice.

“Show me! Open your eyes, papi please.” He never did.

“She was daddy’s little girl,” Frankie J ends.

***

At the time I am writing this, papi has been dead for exactly one year and three months. I’ve spent approximately 10,968 hours of my life thinking, actively and subconsciously, about what to do with his ashes. None of my ideas have stuck well, but he speaks to me–in my dreams, through the clouds shaped like hearts, through the Dark-eyed Juncos that visit me on my apartment balcony, through the cabbage white butterflies fluttering around the city…he is everywhere and nowhere.

This is grief.

Aug 08, 2026