The first Christmas after my mom died, my dad called hysterical because the tree had fallen over. I drove over with my three little ones, and when I walked into the entryway, there it was. The Christmas tree, lying flat across the living room floor, ornaments and all, like it just wanted to sleep. Like it had simply lain down and given up. We set to work, my son and me, trying to lift it back upright and get it standing again.

It wasn’t really about the tree, of course. The tree was every bit of grief he couldn’t hold, toppling over all at once, and he couldn’t face it alone, so he called. And I came. I came with my babies around my feet, in the middle of my own hard season, to help my father lift the fallen thing back up. That was where we were, the two of us, that first year. Holding each other up.

Because right after she died, we needed each other, plainly and mutually. I was at the start of my divorce and he helped me. He spent time with me, he helped with the kids and the legal mess, he offered to pitch in with the rent and the yard, he was going to watch the kids when they started school so I could work. And he did help. I want to be fair about that, because it was real. For a while, my dad showed up for me the way a father should, and it mattered, and I was grateful. At the same time, I was trying to be there for him, a man who had just lost his wife of a lifetime. We were two grieving people propping each other up, and for a season, it worked. Then it stopped. Not all at once. But it stopped.

My mom had asked for one thing before she died. She’d said that if something happened, whoever was left should wait at least six months before moving on. A small, dignified request. He waited the six months, technically. But to me it felt like six weeks. He took her photographs down around the house and put up this other woman’s. He was enthralled, lit up, a man reconnecting with a high school romance he’d rekindled at a reunion. I was cautiously glad for him at first, because I did want him happy. But it came so fast, and it started to feel like too much, like her whole world was being redecorated before any of us had finished grieving her.

The day I understood how far gone he already was, my poppy, my mom’s father, was failing, and my sister was driving us to the hospital to see him. On the way, we ended up on the phone with a neighbor, my mom’s best friend, a woman we’d known since I was three years old. That was how we learned that my dad and this lady had just been at her house, announcing they were engaged. Ring and everything.

That was how I found out my father was getting remarried. From a neighbor. On the way to a hospital. He hadn’t said a single word to his own daughters.

So my sister and I are sitting with that, upset, somber, on our way to sit with our sick grandfather. We get to the hospital and we’re standing there waiting for the elevator. And here come my dad and this woman, almost skipping toward us, giddy as a couple of kids. They reach us and they can feel that the mood is heavy, and one of them asks, “What’s the problem?”

And my sister says, “You’re the problem,” and pokes the woman right in the chest.

I stood there thinking, oh, jeez. My sister and I went up to see our poppy. I don’t even remember what became of the two of them after that; I don’t think we saw them the rest of the day. And later my sister explained that she’d poked the woman because I had gotten her upset in the car, which is its own small familiar note, being handed the blame for a scene I hadn’t made. But that’s a different essay.

Not long after all of that, he moved. And once he moved, the help I’d been leaning on was simply gone, and it never came back. I did the rest alone. I’ve written elsewhere about how much of my life I’ve done alone, and this is part of where that came from. A father who was there, really there, and then chose a life that didn’t have room in it.

Here is where I’ve landed on it now, and I’ve worked to get here honestly. We live separate lives. I want him safe and happy in the parallel that got created that year. I’m not angry at him for finding love again; a widower is allowed to find love again. That woman is long gone now anyway, replaced by someone else. His life went on, in its own direction, away from ours, and I’ve made my peace with it.

What I haven’t fully made peace with is my children. Because my dad has no real relationship with them. A Christmas giftcard arrives in the mail. That’s the extent of it. And I can’t help measuring that against what I had, because I wrote a whole piece about my two grandfathers, the truck driver who called me Homer and taught me cards, the engineer who let me steer the car into the garage. Those men made me feel safe and known and adored. My kids got a grandfather who mails a present once a year. The distance between those two things is enormous, and it is the part that still catches in my throat.

That’s the real grief. Not the ring, not the photos, not even the skipping at the hospital. It’s that my children have a grandfather who chose to be a return address instead of a person. And it’s the support I lost, right when I was carrying the most, when the tree had fallen over and for a little while there were two of us to lift it.

Then there was one. There was usually just one.