Today that song came to mind to help me process how I feel about losing my dad. His passing has cracked me open. I have a greater access to empathy than I ever had before. I almost feel like the main character from Parable of the Sower. In a world where trauma and death is commodified, I find myself often crying and easily empathizing with people who have had to deal with grief. I am the opposite of desensitized, which requires me to curate the content I intake very intentionally.
But there is a narrative I want to put out with my content, like light. And a version of that light is my father's legacy. Not as a museum, triumphant type of legacy, but more so like an average, everyday, funny story type of legacy.
With this website, I hope to digitize the ancient act of storytelling. I want to memorialize my father by giving him a corner of the internet that can live on. I am calling it "Mike Gaiter's Daughter" because I want it to be told through the eyes I saw him as.
I saw him as immortal. A man who never caught a cold. Who could build anything I asked, and things I didn't ask for. A man who got frustrated with the people who "hogged all the weights at the gym." A man who knew the ins and outs of both the book of Revelation and the Fast & Furious series.
I want to preserve that man, so I can share my experience easily, hell, maybe even use his website as a reference point. Because my father's life was remarkable, and our brains are fickle, so I want these stories and memories to live both in and outside of me, so that the stories and memories I have of him can be as immortal as I thought he would be.
