Ceren Ege

I keep a list in my phone of the names of my friends who came to my father's visitation.

I have never admitted that before because it feels grossly self-indulgent to have it.

I felt strange about this list for a long time, even though I never revisited it, until one day I found in my father's nightstand after he passed all of the birthday cards that my sister and I had ever written to him.

And I wondered whether he ever revisited those loving words or if they served the same function that my list did for me in that their mere existence was enough reassurance that somebody cared for him in this large and often lonely world.

I am trying to be more honest like my father was.

In the conversations that I had with people at his visitation who knew him well, there was one quality that they kept repeating, that he was a very honest man.

Almost as if they were getting paid to say it.

And even though my father joked his way through life, he was the kind of person who, when he said he would do something, he did it.

That's why it was a big deal that when he promised me that when he died, if he became a ghost, that he would come back and give me some sort of sign that he was, in fact, Turkish Gaspar.

Let me backtrack to August 2017.

My dad was recently diagnosed with a rare complication of cancer that gave him about a six month prognosis.

By the time I started my sophomore year in college in September, I was driving home every weekend to a new downfall of my dad's health.

The first weekend, he'd be in a wheelchair.

The next weekend, he'd be using a catheter.

The next weekend, he was bedridden.

I decided that I needed to record his voice, and it's Halloween 2017, and I'm sitting across from my father.

I secretly press record on my phone and put it away, and we start our normal bantering, sarcasm, light-hearted conversation, and I go, okay, Bubba, now this is serious, okay?

I know you're an atheist, and I know you don't believe in an afterlife, but I have a proposition.

If you find yourself existing in some form somewhere after you pass, then I need you to come back and give me a sign in some way.

Don't be too obvious, but don't make it too subtle.