With my father’s first visits to the oncologist, so started my early morning drives to meet my parents at the office.

I’d rouse the older ones to let them know the younger one was already awake downstairs and had had breakfast and head out on my own. A forty-five minute ride of silence became full with plenty of thoughts, questions, and worries.

But the agency of getting there at a certain time and meeting with/talking to the doctor, collecting information for my parents, being a second set of ears, a sounding board, a buffer, was an outlet for the enormity of what ifs and kicked the certainty of what we all dreaded into some indeterminate future.

When it became clear that he did, in fact, have cancer (one of the worst general zeitgeist told me you could get), my mind morphed to getting him through treatment, supporting him and making it as . . . enjoyable . . . as possible? or at least less horrific. The musical soundtracks of my sunshine drenched drives, soon to be snuffed out by ice cold air conditioning, inspired a growing playlist I was mentally making for my dad.

First, I pictured it as tunes meant to soothe and relax him as he sat through chemotherapy or radiation or whatever they would pump into him as he sat tethered to a chair. Then, when it was clear those weren’t options, I pictured the sonic waves surrounding him at home as he peacefully rested. When he slipped away faster than any of us could have imagined, a goal in that frenzied week between his passing and services was to finish that damned list so at least we could all listen to the kind of songs he loved as we celebrated his life. His spirit could still reverberate around us even if his presence didn’t.

A year ago this week, he lay on his death bed. And though it’s lived in my memory and mind’s eye and ears and in bits and pieces on the notes app of my phone, I built the playlist I never played for my father today. As I listened to each song before I hit the plus sign adding it to the list, I felt the moods and melodies envelop me, raise me up, raise that terribly beautiful feeling of love and anguish, holding me up and threatening to drop me from a great height like all of the delicately heartbreaking hymns of sacred masses.

And it pained me to think that he would’ve loved all these songs – if I’d only been able to share the carefully curated list I’d made for him.

And then I wondered if it was really all more for me all along.