The Election Gave Me A Reason To Be Grateful My Dad's Not Here For The Holidays

This holiday season there will be no devastating political discussion at our dinner table. My father, the only one of my family members who may have voted red, has been gone for almost 20 years now.

When I was young, my dad said he wanted to be a school bus driver when he retired. The kids in my neighborhood were truly terrible to our bus driver, and I worried for him about this. When I adopted my own (now debunked) dream to become a veterinarian, I was pleased when he vowed to become my assistant instead. He always said he would “put the dogs up on the table” for me, as if this was a veterinary assistant’s only duty.

I never got a chance to find out what his retirement would have looked like. He had a heart attack on the basketball court when I was 15 — he was 54 — and died suddenly.

Sometimes I imagine that he is driving a bus full of heavenly dogs right now, that he lifts tenderly into their seats. Because of his death, I can keep on loving him only exactly this way, as a dog lifter and bus driver.

Since he was a fiscally conservative Republican in life, I don’t know if my dad would have voted for Donald Trump. For this I have a complicated gratitude that I can never forgive our 45th president for. I loved my father fiercely. To have any reason at all to not want him back fills me with a stew of shame.

My dad was a patriotic individual in a '90s way, earnestly believing America was the greatest nation on Earth, reminding us often how lucky we were to live here. He was a trivia and history buff who loved even the smallest, dustiest historical museum and who almost made it on to Jeopardy! (if only he’d known the main ingredient in guacamole). On a cross-country roadtrip from Colorado to Dad’s hometown in New York my parents took my sister and I on, we were forced to stop at every state capital, place of interest, or memorial site.

Where my mom read fiction voraciously, the books I remember on his nightstand were war histories, biographies of former Yankees players, and The Art of the Deal. I’m grateful I don’t know much about my father’s feelings toward Trump aside from that he liked that book and admired him as a real estate mogul, Dad having been a realtor himself. Trump was a different figure then, someone we knew from his name on buildings and his cameo in Home Alone 2. I can’t imagine my father would be happy with someone with no political background running for president — but that’s the thing, I can only imagine.

I believe he would’ve been tormented by his presidential choices in the last few elections, but ultimately, he would have voted as he took the civic duty of an American citizen seriously. I’ll just never know for sure who he would’ve voted for in 2016 or 2024.

Like others, I was physically ill the morning after the most recent election, a nervous nausea amplified over the following week by the growing misogyny online, and Trump’s dystopian video promises for his upcoming term. Almost 35, should I be lucky enough to have a second child, my next pregnancy will be considered geriatric, my risk of miscarriage growing with time. This is only one reason I’ve been haunted by the women dying because they cannot receive proper reproductive healthcare. With a daughter who I’ll soon enroll in school, I’m terrified over our lack of gun control. I’m worried sick about my queer and trans friends whose identity Trump hopes to erase. I’m nervous for my mom and stepdad who will need Medicare soon. I’m anxious for what will become of the many immigrants in my life.

I’m particularly devastated by the message Trump and his champions deliver to women, especially young girls: You do not matter. But at least, as I discussed white elephant rules and drafted a Thanksgiving menu with my family, I wasn’t nervous to enjoy the holidays with them. If my father had voted for Trump, especially this time around, I don’t know if I could have ever forgiven him.

Examples of relationships ending because of Trump are plentiful, specking the internet and each of our own lives. I became so upset with one friend for voting for him the first time, our last dinner ended in tears. We haven’t seen each other since. Another friend of mine stopped speaking to her aunt after a fight over vaccinations. The next thing my friend knew, she was attending her funeral, her aunt an unfortunate COVID fatality. Yet another friend of mine hasn’t spoken to her father since 2017.

In the early 2000s my mom and aunt, both Democrats, would trade gag gifts with my dad. Toilet paper with George W. Bush’s face on it or a crude birthday card of Bill Clinton playing sax in the nude. They would all laugh, my Dad hardest of all, sometimes until he cried, dragging his big mitt of a hand over his face as if it’d been sprayed with snow. They’d push each other’s buttons at the dinner table, usually conceding to a good point or two, and we’d move on to passing a plate of cannoli and playing a rousing game of Taboo. This was the America I grew up in, the America I was promised. Trump took that away.

Right after the election, I “unfriended” the last one of the boys I used to ride the bus with who I was still connected to on Facebook. He’d posted a “your body, my choice” meme to his wall.

That boy was picked up at the stop right after mine to be taken to middle school. He and the other boys in his group would push other kids’ heads as they stormed to the back of the bus yelling obscenities, launching spitballs, and lighting seats on fire so the whole bus filled with the smell of burning rubber and sometimes hair when they got bored and moved on to flicking their lighters at each other’s knees and heads. We went through five bus drivers in one year, no one able to withstand their unruliness. Dad ended up driving me to a stop on a different bus route in the morning. This wasn’t the America he remembered as a kid, the America that made him want to be a bus driver. The kids who lit the bus on fire grew up to be a different kind of Republican than Dad remembers, too.

My dad’s hometown of Rochester, New York reeks of Americana. His parents were the first inhabitants of their little house there in the early '50s and were very proud to provide a life to go with it — an American dream. My grandfather worked hard for the US post office, my grandmother was a homemaker, and my dad and his brother enjoyed an idyllic childhood riding bikes, getting donuts after church, and even holding an annual presidential election for their favorite bears. According to his younger brother, Dad’s bear always won.

When I went back to Rochester to reconnect with family last year, I drove past his childhood home and found the neighborhood looking shabbier than before, surrounded by strip malls and chain-link fences. On the front lawn of his old house was a big truck, another in the driveway. The new owner’s hat was red. This scared me, like my electric vehicle seemed to scare him. We connected over the old America, when he recognized my last name. “LaBue,” he said with a big grin, “of course!” This recognition was a little slice of the way life used to be. He let me take some pictures in front of his house, and I imagine we both thought of how much things have changed.

Every Christmas since losing my dad has felt emptier than my first 15 Christmases. Once you lose a parent young, you can never go back to the fullness of a holiday as a kid. My mom and sister and I have always tried, building new traditions, keeping up the old, and showering each other in presents. My niece, nephew, and daughter have made it better — getting to experience it through the eyes of Dad’s grandchildren.

Now I also have this complicated gratitude. Not knowing what my dad thinks of my career, my daughter, even the Yankees’ performance in the World Series will always give me a kind of windless sock to my stomach.

But another type of wondering evokes a different emotion: Would my dad worry about my rights and those of my daughter like I worried about him becoming a bus driver? Would he protect me from the kid on the bus like I tried to protect him? This type of not knowing is a relief.

Now I get to decide that he would. Now I get to picture how he would fit into this future. I imagine that just as he wanted to carry the burdensome weight of the dogs at my veterinary practice, he would want to help carry the load of these burdens, too.

Sammi LaBue is the founder of the ongoing writing community, Fledgling Writing Workshops (Best Writing Classes, TimeOut NY). Some of her other essays have been published in Slate, Literary Hub, Glamour, The Offing, and elsewhere. You can find her writing portfolio here and join her Substack for opportunities to write with her. Her latest project is a just finished memoir written in collaboration with her mom titled, Bad Apples.

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