The essay, published June 11 in The Guardian, opens with Sloat describing the running list she and her father kept of ways they did not want to die, with being buried alive at number one. She wrote that most fathers would shield their children from such morbid fascinations, but hers did the opposite. “He saw death as life’s most honest teacher and ensured I wouldn’t meet it as a stranger,” she wrote.
Sloat details her father’s background. He was the second of four boys, delivered by a local doctor in the family farmhouse in Indiana. His only sister was stillborn. Death was a regular feature of his childhood: dogs hit by tractors, barn cats meeting untimely ends, slaughtered chickens running around with their heads cut off. As a university student, he lived above a funeral home and helped collect and prepare bodies in exchange for discounted rent. According to Sloat, her father observed that “many people hadn’t known that morning they were putting on their socks for the last time.”
Sloat experienced her first death at age three, when her next-door playmate died unexpectedly of respiratory failure. Her father held her hand as she knocked on the parents’ door to offer condolences, reassuring her that she would not similarly die in her sleep. Years later, her parents brought her to a funeral home when a neighbor died. She wrote that her father said she could touch the body and explained the skin would feel “cool and waxy.”
The essay describes the family’s tradition of casket photography. Sloat recalled photos of herself standing awkwardly next to deceased grandparents, unsure of the appropriate facial expression. When challenged on the practice, her father said the photos helped him remember.
Sloat wrote that her father died in a car accident in mid-April 2019. He was driving to work on icy roads after an overnight snowstorm near his lakeside home in Michigan. By the time she flew home from Washington D.C. that evening, the snow had melted. She left the hospital with a bag of his clothes — he had worn jeans instead of his usual dress pants in case he needed to shovel snow from the parking lot. Paramedics had cut off his black leather jacket to restart his heart on the roadside.
The family continued the casket-photography tradition. The album now includes a picture of Sloat standing next to her father’s body. During the eulogy she turned to his casket and suggested it was a good time for him to join the gathering, but there was no reply.
Sloat writes that as she approaches her seventh Father’s Day without him, she still hears his voice and thinks of sending him additions to their unusual-death list. She said she has become more intentional about celebrating with family and offering praise while it can still be heard. “I strive to live with death’s certainty, embodying my dad’s teaching that acknowledging its presence makes life shine with greater purpose,” she wrote. “And when I put on my socks every morning, I am reminded of the beauty and fragility of life.”