“Someone loves you!” My mom read this text message on my dad’s phone number.

My dad’s phone number. It’s strange to say it, as it was now my mom’s phone number after my dad had died five months prior. My mom received this message on Valentine’s Day. She told me about the message a few months later. But on that day, she was distraught.

What an asshole, she thought. The thought of her husband having an affair hadn’t crossed her mind until that day.

My dad died suddenly, or at least it felt sudden for me and my sister. It turned out he had lung cancer. He told us he had pneumonia and needed to have his lung removed because of a complication. We believed him. He told us that he would get the operation in the oncological hospital because there is no other hospital where you could get this operation. We believed him. We were young. Then a blood clot killed him. He didn’t even recover from the anesthesia. Years later, my sister and I found out that Mom knew about his diagnosis. She never told us. I guess they all tried to protect us. We found out when my mom got lung cancer herself. But that was years later.

My mom was reading the proof of a love affair. “Someone loves you!” After all those years spent together, after a life full of challenges and difficulties, dark secrets start to spill out. Now, years later, when I’m attending group therapy after my mom’s death and hearing lots of stories of family members discovering the secrets of the dead—affairs, debts, second families—I always remember my dad and that wretched message that someone loved him.

When my dad died, group therapy wasn’t available. We didn’t have therapy at all. We were living in a post-Soviet country few have heard of; it was a time of bottling things up and moving on. I was twenty-two when he died. He died young, barely fifty-five years old. But he had smoked all his life. Two packs a day and then lung cancer. Ironically enough, my mom’s lung cancer was far more aggressive, even though she never smoked. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

When I think about my parents’ deaths, I can’t help but be amazed at how different death was for each of them. With my dad it was sudden. It was a shock. We never saw it coming.

In both cases, I found out about their deaths through a phone call. Strangely enough, when my mom called me to tell me that dad died, I knew that I had to take the call; I knew it was important. I was at a lecture at the university. Intuition works in strange ways. Years later, as I rode in a taxi, I received a phone call from the hospital where my mom was and I knew what they were about say. Even if you know what the call is about, you have to take it; there’s no place to run or hide from it. Now I hate phone calls. I especially hate when someone calls late in the evening. I start to think that something has happened.

With my mom, we knew about her diagnosis. I was there with her. There’s no bigger torture in this world than watching your loved one die and being unable to do anything about it. They can be your parents, your children, your husband, your wife, anyone you care for most in this world. It feels like someone is killing them while forcing your eyes open to watch it, with no way to escape what you are about to see, no way to unsee it after. I felt utterly useless, helpless, disgustingly weak.

Disappointingly enough, there were no dark secrets after my mom’s passing. How I wish there had been. Some illicit affair, some hidden millions, or maybe some connection to the Russian mafia. Anything at all to have some distraction from her death. We kept her phone number for a while and no message “Someone loves you!” came. I guess with my dad being dead for more than twelve years, they’d know by now not to send messages to that phone number. In the end, my sister and I decided to get rid of the phone number. It belonged to both our parents, both of whom died of lung cancer. I am not a believer of the supernatural, but it just felt like bad luck.

The thought of doing therapy never crossed my mind, not even years later, after my dad passed and therapy became available. After he died, I couldn’t talk about him for seven and a half years. Not a single word, not a single story, no mention of my dad at all for seven and a half years. No mention of the someone who loved my dad. Now I realize I had a trauma response, but back then I just hadn’t thought of doing anything about it. Until my mom passed. She died eleven and a half years after my dad died. She was sixty-six and a half. Never have I ever envisioned, not even in my wildest nightmares, that I would spend my thirty-third birthday with both my parents dead.

Now with Valentine’s Day approaching, I think about my dad and his life. He, too, lost both of his parents young; he was barely thirty-five when they died. His brother died shortly after, slowly, of the Chernobyl radiation disease. He suffered similar losses when he was around the age I am now. And yet, we never talked about his losses. We never talked about my grandparents. There were no stories, no funny facts, not even photographs around the house. Albeit, there were no phones back then, cameras and photographs were more of a luxury, only available at weddings, funerals, and special occasions.

Now, when I’m thinking about my losses, I realize I take the same approach. I don’t talk about my parents to my nieces, don’t tell them stories, don’t even mention their names. They will grow up not knowing anything about their grandparents. Maybe it’s the way my family deals with loss—toss it under the rug and don’t mention it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing. But that’s a conversation for another day.

This is the story of how someone loved my father. My mom came to me a few months after she received the “Someone loves you!” message:

“I have something to tell you”, she said. “It might be unpleasant. Your dad had an affair. Can you take a look?”

She wanted to know who’d sent the message. After a few months sitting with this information, after this ate at her every evening, she decided to investigate. My mom was the kind of woman who would move a mountain if it stood in her way. In this case the mountain was the nagging question of, who was the other woman? I decided to take a look at the number and the message. My mom had only read me part of the message. There was more:

“Someone loves you! With the occasion of Valentine’s Day, benefit from our promotion and receive discounts and gifts when topping up your account. For more information visit our website”

The message was from our phone provider.

Needless to say, my mom wasn’t very tech savvy. For a few minutes, our hysterical laughter created an earthquake threat for the residents of our block. Months of festering with the idea that her dead husband was having an affair resulted in one of the most treasured memories I have about my parents. There’s another story I love about my dad’s death. It was my sister and my cousin who had to go to the morgue to get the body. At the entrance of the morgue, there was an ad for meds with some pretty women on it. My cousin looked at it and said,

“Well, at least we know he’s in heaven.”

I never knew, not until they died, that there is a place for humor in death.

I remember I was having dinner with a friend. Her dad had died a few months before, my mom had died over a year before, and we were talking about grief.
“I had very bad anxiety,” I said.
“You or your mom?” she asked.
“Me, of course. My mom’s dead!”
She lived on the seventh floor, but I’m pretty sure people down on the street heard us laughing.

Now I love dead parent jokes. They’re the only jokes that make me genuinely laugh, make me accept, for a split second, or sometimes for a whole minute, the horrors of what happened.

Now that I can talk about my father, I am eagerly listening to stories about him. My aunt told me recently a story about my dad and how he stole a tank once. He was in the army, barely eighteen years old, somewhere in the middle of nowhere of the Soviet Union. He wanted to impress the ladies. What better way to impress women than stealing an army tank and driving it to town? Fortunately, it was past Stalin times, so he wasn’t executed for this, just incarcerated in the army cell for ninety-two days. My aunt even showed me a picture of that tank and my young father next to it. She doesn’t know if the ladies were impressed, or whether it was worth it—I know I would have been impressed!

Through stories like this, through laughter and humor, we can cope with the unbearableness of death. We can tell and share stories of our loved ones, for once, with no tears of sadness, but with tears of happiness. Through humor, we can pass on the stories of their lives and let them be remembered for a little longer.

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