Death of Aza Holmes’s father

The death of Aza Holmes’s father is both a sudden childhood loss and a memory that keeps returning in concrete fragments: a stopped lawn mower, music still playing, and a doctor’s question in a hospital family room. Years afterward, Aza preserves her connection to her father through his old phone and the photographs on it, making remembrance less a single act of farewell than a relationship she continues to carry.

The collapse and emergency

Aza remembers her father falling while the lawn mower was running nearby. He was lying on his side near the only tree in the front yard, his headphones still playing an old soul song loudly enough for her to hear. The music’s ordinary, tinny persistence jarred against the stillness of his body; in the memory, it is the sound that makes the scene especially difficult to reconcile.

Aza’s mother told her to call 911. Aza told the operator that her father had fallen, then asked her mother whether he was breathing when the operator asked. Her mother said he was not. Aza’s recollection holds these small exchanges alongside the song, preserving the frightening practical sequence of the emergency rather than turning it into a generalized account of loss.

Confirmation at the hospital

Aza’s mother performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. At the time, they did not know for certain that he was dead. That knowledge came later, while Aza and her mother waited in a windowless hospital family room: a doctor opened the door and asked, “Did your husband have a heart condition?” The question’s past-tense reference to her mother’s husband made the death legible to them. The account does not establish whether Aza’s father had a heart condition; what it records is the moment the family learned he had died.

The phone and the pictures

Eight years after her father’s body stopped working, Aza still kept his phone and a charging cord hidden in the trunk of Harold, beside the spare tire. Her mother had backed up his pictures and emails to a computer and multiple hard drives, but Aza preferred to swipe through them on the phone itself. Its continued ability to work made it feel distinct from an archive: it was the device through which she had always encountered the pictures, and it had belonged to her father.

The photographs show what caught his attention: Aza, her mother, and, often, the sky divided by tree branches. Aza recognizes that image in the leafless branches above the river and wonders what her father saw in the split-apart sky. In the phone’s childhood pictures, she finds herself on a playground swing at Juan Solomon Park, leaning back toward the camera. The image brings to mind her father pushing her, and the remembered certainty that swinging away from him also meant swinging back to him. Other pictures show her mother on a tiny tricycle with Aza on her shoulders and Aza eating breakfast with cinnamon sugar on her face. The crooked selfies, sometimes partly out of frame, catch her curling toward her mother; in a run of near-identical shots, her mother’s smile changes and young Aza shifts, while her father’s face remains still.

Aza’s favorite pictures of him are the few in which he is out of focus. She chooses one taken at a Pacers game, with the basketball court behind him and a friend, because its blur seems true to how people are. At Applebee’s, before meeting Daisy, Aza takes the phone from Harold’s trunk, plugs it in, and waits for it to turn on. As she looks through the images, she tells her father that she has unexpectedly come into money, will try to do right by it, and misses him. The exchange is one-sided, but the old phone gives her a familiar place from which to address him.

Recurrence and continuing bond

The memory and the phone recur in Aza’s life rather than remaining confined to one recollection. After a movie with Davis, she tells him she is tired and goes into the garage for her father’s phone. She sneaks past her sleeping mother, plugs it into an old wall charger, and spends a long time looking at the photographs of the sky broken by branches. Her mother gently reminds her that the same pictures are on the computer. The difference for Aza is not access to the images alone: she wants to see them on the device that was her father’s.

In the months that follow, Aza and Daisy spend much of their free time together, and Aza says she continues to miss her father, as well as Davis and Harold. The account places this enduring grief beside the effort to keep going: she gets better without ever quite getting well. Her father’s death therefore remains more than a completed event in the past. It is a loss repeatedly approached through sound, photographs, an inherited object, and the act of telling him what is happening in her life.