I lost my stepdad, Michael, five days ago. Pancreatic cancer took him quickly and cruelly. At 78, he was gone like smoke.
“You were everything to him, Clover,” someone whispered, gripping my hand as though I might drift away.
I nodded. I thanked them—again and again—and I meant every word. But nothing truly settled inside me.
I stood beside the urn, next to a photograph of Michael squinting into the sunlight, a smudge of grease still visible on his cheek.
That photo had sat on his nightstand for years. Now, it felt like a placeholder—a stand-in for the man who taught me how to change a tire and take pride in signing my own name.
“You just left me… alone,” I murmured softly to the picture.
Michael had met my mom, Carina, when I was just two years old. They married in a quiet, intimate ceremony. I have no memory of that day, or even of life before him.
My earliest memory is sitting high on his shoulders at the county fair, one sticky hand clutching a balloon, the other tangled in his hair.
My mom died when I was four. That’s a sentence I’ve carried with me my entire life.
When Michael fell ill last year, I moved back into the house without hesitation. I cooked for him, drove him to every appointment, and sat beside his bed when the pain silenced him.
I didn’t do any of it out of obligation.
I did it because he was my father in every way that mattered.
After the funeral, the house filled with quiet conversation and the soft clinking of cutlery. Someone laughed too loudly in the kitchen, and the harsh scrape of a fork against a plate made people turn their heads.
I stood near the hallway table, holding a glass of lemonade I hadn’t even tasted. The furniture still carried his scent—wood polish, aftershave, and that faint trace of lavender soap he always insisted wasn’t his.
Aunt Sammie appeared beside me as if she had always belonged there. She wrapped me in a tight embrace.
