I remember my dad packing a bunch of something in the back of a truck with me. I don’t know if it was one of the many times I moved, or a vacation, or some other occasion where I was moving a bunch of stuff from point A to point B.

He would remind me that everything needed to be secured. When you were traveling at high speeds, things could topple over, and he didn’t want anything falling out of the truck bed.

When we finally finished packing, he would get out this never-ending spool of white rope (I swear, he had endless amounts of this rope available my entire life) and he would create a sort of spider’s web over the back of the truck and tie each end down with the most intricate knot you have ever seen.

This was not a square knot, or a figure eight, or any of a number of hitches. This was some type of undefinable macrame. I wish I could describe it properly, but you just have to imagine.

I’ve untied many of these knots in my life, tracing the intricate pattern of the rope over, under, around and through, muttering, “ugh, Dad….” under my breath as I did. I mean, of course a regular knot would have been fine. Of course one or two lengths of rope across the truck bed would have been sufficient. But no, not for my father.

Earlier this week, I unloaded one of those easy set-up pools (temporary, collapsible, foldable, they have many names) from my car to set up in my back yard. My mom bought it a few years ago, to entertain the grandkids one summer when she was watching them quite a bit for us (thank you, Mom!). She didn’t want to set it up anymore, so she gave it to me.

Anyways, when I popped it out of the trunk and put it on the ground I noticed how the pool was secured – with one of those big, ungodly, 6-inch x 3-inch knot monsters. I began to undo the knot, muttering quietly, breaking my nails and getting sweat in my eyes as I unravelled it.

And suddenly, it was gone.

And that’s when I realized, that will probably be the last of Dad’s monster knots that I will ever untie.

That will be the last one I’ll ever see.

That’s it. No more endless unravelling. No more ridiculously intricate, over the top, unnecessary, beautiful, special, one-of-a-kind knots.

Of course I cried, and of course I regretted not taking a picture, or cutting it out of the rope and preserving it in some way. But what could I do? It was gone.

I know the knots my dad tied were not him, but it was hard to see that piece of him gone from the world. This little, funny, unique thing about him that never changed.

Another person’s mind is completely unknowable. There were many things I could not understand about my dad when he was living. Untying those knots was one hands-on way I felt like I could understand what he was thinking. I never cut them. I always took the time to undo each twist by hand.

Now that he and the knots are gone, the only real part of him left to me is what’s in my head. The voice I hear sometimes when I think of his reaction to this writing, the memories I have of him making up songs for me, the many times he helped me pack and move another load of God knows what.

I will probably never physically untie one of Dad’s knots again. But it’s not lost on me that this work that I am doing is just the work of endlessly untying different kinds of knots: the ones that hurt, or are confusing.

The untying can be satisfying, like a puzzle solved. But just like the real life knots, the mental ones give some kind of security in their familiarity, and they can hurt when they are gone as well.