After Losing My Father, One Direction Helped Me Find Joy During Grief

That first time I heard it, the music was so catchy and the words were so ridiculous that I threw my head back and laughed. I opened the curtains that had been closed for a month.

People who loved One Direction loved them hard. We loved them so hard that the boys (always “the boys”) broke records. We loved them so hard that they churned out an album a year, and we still weren’t satisfied—there was a running joke that the band was never able to release an album without it first being leaked online.

Their fourth album, Four, came out when I was eighteen. The day before it was released, a group of fans in Brazil went to a listening party and illegally recorded it, so if you cared more about the boys than you did pirating laws (and most of us did), you could listen a day early. For that first day, all we had was what would become known as the “Brazilian Youth” version, which included the voices of the fans who were recording introducing each new melody and singing along, so you couldn’t actually hear the music that well, but we were all too excited to care.

I listened to that recording the day it was leaked, of course. I was in my dorm room in Oxford, 3,500 miles away from my hometown. While I listened, I texted a friend seventy-two times in a row to share all of my thoughts. And then I put my head in my hands and cried until I felt like I would explode.

It had been a month, to the day, since my dad died, and anything that looked like excitement had been cut out of me so abruptly I barely even noticed, at first. It had been a month since I had last been excited about something; a month where I started to think that maybe I wasn’t ever going to be excited about anything again. When excitement came back, even for that moment, it didn’t just feel like I was myself again—it felt like I had my dad back.

I’ve always gotten really excited about the things I love, and my dad was always right there, ready and willing to get excited with me. I first got into One Direction when I was sixteen or seventeen, and he let me explain who each of the boys were and watched the videos I sent him to prove that their voices were amazing, that they were more than a boyband.

The first thing I loved like that was iCarly, when I was twelve and didn’t fit right in my body and was just slightly too old to be into iCarly. I joined a LiveJournal community filled with moms who had accidentally gotten too into the show their kids loved. It was deeply, deeply important to me that Sam and Freddie, the titular character’s best friends, got together and stayed together forever. The fans decided that purple was Sam and Freddie’s color, so I spent weekends painting my nails purple and baking purple cupcakes before special episodes that I watched on spliced cable one of my dad’s sketchy auto-shop customers hooked up for us.

How cringey, to love something that fleeting that hard.

When I found out months in advance that Sam and Freddie were going to kiss on an upcoming episode, I invited two friends over to watch, because this was important. When the kiss finally happened, my dad took a picture. There I am, square glasses and shaggy bangs, grinning so hugely that you can see every (purple) bracket in my braces. Behind the camera, there’s my dad with no idea what’s going on, but knowing I wanted to keep it.

I eventually moved on from iCarly and found a new love: The Starkids. Imagine the theatre kids you went to high school with or the improv group at your college. Now picture them even more aggressively larger-than-life and followed by thousands of screaming teenage girls. They were, I imagine, exactly the kind of thing my Pink-Floyd-laser-show-watching, Black-Sabbath-t-shirt-wearing dad hoped I would never get into. But they told us it was cool to be smart, to care too much. They told us that girls with mustaches are beautiful and fun and interesting, and we’d grow up and be just fine. And suddenly, when the boys in my classes started noticing my body but mocking my face, the Starkids were the only people who mattered.

When they did their first international tour, my dad drove six hours round trip so that he, my cousin, and I could see the Starkids.

I cried. He stood near the back and watched what had to look like something out of The Blob, this hoard of people screaming and falling over themselves because a twenty-something man was singing a song as a drag queen version of Dolores Umbridge.

I ate McDonald’s chicken nuggets on the three-hour car ride home. I showed my dad the Starkids songs I had on my iPod, and he, with a patience only a hall-of-fame parent or Catholic saint can possess, spent three hours hearing everything he’d just heard all over again, trying to learn some of the words. We were our own encore.

It went the other way, too. My dad played old Broadway cast recordings on vinyl for me and then drove our family to New York and waited in line in Times Square so that I could see a show live. He got me a front-row seat, one time, while he sat way in the back. He told me about going to Rocky Horror midnight shows in high school, and now I have to go every year.

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The first time I noticed something off with my dad was in January of my senior year of high school. It was the coldest day of the year, and my dad took the day off work to take me to Toronto and see a Wednesday matinee of Once. We sat in the very back row, and he couldn’t stop coughing, loud enough that I was sure the actors could hear. I was embarrassed.

In March, my dad called home from the doctor’s office. My mom picked up and started crying as she listened to his update. When he got home he hugged me first, and I wanted to hold on tighter than I ever had, but I was suddenly afraid of breaking him.

By then, I’d already gotten into university in Oxford. My dream school, my dream program. We didn’t talk about whether or not I’d go. Staying felt like giving up. I put my senior prom dress on three days early and got ready like it was the real deal, so we could take pictures because my dad was starting chemo the day of prom. The doctors told him his lung needed to be removed. I didn’t look up the surgery, because when I’d looked up his diagnosis I saw the 80% mortality rate, and I didn’t need any more statistics.

I flew out to Oxford a week before the surgery.

A month before the Brazilian Youth gave us the leaked songs, two months after I arrived in Oxford and did everything I could to make my life there, I came home from class and got a Skype call from my mom. I knew what it was about before I picked up.

I don’t think she was crying when she told me. I only remember hearing we lost daddy today.

When excitement came back, even for that moment, it didn’t just feel like I was myself again—it felt like I had my dad back.

His one remaining lung had gotten infected, and he wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. It wasn’t a surprise. But isn’t it always a surprise? Don’t you always think that you’ll be the exception?

That’s what your body does, when it happens. It convinces you that you could still be the exception, that maybe they got it wrong, and it warps your brain until the only thing you can do is survive each day, even if that means waking up and going back to sleep and pretending the day never happened in the first place. Every day, I had to remind myself that it was real.

Things stopped being exciting, because why would something be exciting if my dad wasn’t there to be excited at? Why would anything make me happy if I was never going to be actually happy ever again? It didn’t matter that I’d stopped eating. I could see that there was fun and excitement in the world, but I didn’t see myself as part of that world anymore. Fun and excitement weren’t for me, barely tethered to my body, counting my fingers in class to see if I was awake or dreaming.

When Four leaked, I was mostly operating on autopilot. I had figured out a routine: If I wasn’t in class or drinking, I was asleep. I posted selfies and kissed my friends in clubs and laughed, but I didn’t feel any of it. It just happened to me. I downloaded the leak because I was a One Direction fan and that’s what I was supposed to do. I pressed play because I knew that’s what came next. I even started texting my friend because that’s what we’d always done.

I didn’t even realize that I was excited, at first. I figured it out halfway through “Girl Almighty,” which became my favorite song on the album. The lyrics make absolutely no sense. It may be, if I were ever to examine it further, a bad song. But I love it with my whole heart. That first time I heard it, the music was so catchy, and the words were so ridiculous that I threw my head back and laughed. I opened the curtains that had been closed for a month. I ordered Chinese food. I brushed my hair.

Almost half a year after Four came out, I met the friend I’d been texting as we both listened to the leaked recording in Birmingham. We walked into the first tattoo shop we could find, and I lay down on a table and felt each burning letter burrow its way home on my ribs: Girl Almighty.

One Direction has been on hiatus for almost four years now, and my tattoo could be called meaningless or embarrassing. How cringey, to love something that fleeting that hard. But when I got my first tattoo, quotation marks on my collarbones, a week after my eighteenth birthday, my dad called it spiritual, almost.

When I got my second, a Doctor Who quote, he said he wanted one as well. My dad was always right there, loving that I loved something. I can see the face he would make when I was in deep, just before he would ask me to tell him everything about whatever I was so excited about this time.

This One Direction tattoo may have been a young or impulsive decision, but it’s worth it. Because it’s like getting to keep that feeling forever.