Me, dad and Hans.
December marked the 10th anniversary of my father’s death, meaning that I’ve lived a full quarter of my life without him.
I’ve learned that it’s not the big things in life that you really miss talking about when you lose a loved one. I don’t need job advice (OK, I totally need job advice, but from a higher authority than my dad). I don’t need him to answer the Big Questions.
Instead, it’s the funny little topics that make me want to talk to him, the goofy questions that pop into my head with some regularity.
Would his love for horror and sci-fi films from the ’50s and ’60s make him a fan of the current cultural obsession with zombies? (I can tell you with certainty that he would have little tolerance for sparkly vampires.) Just how flawed is the Alien prequel? Why did he like dachshunds so much? Doesn’t he think it’s time for a black actor to play Batman? Doctor Who: Still totally awesome, right? Why are there no Tom Waits albums in his music collection, when it simply BEGS for Tom Waits?
It’s the seemingly forgettable one-off chats that I miss, the perfectly benign conversations over coffee (Diet Pepsi for him), not the big, earth-shattering talks that we all think must be so important.
I also miss the dachshunds.
Entirely Adequate 
A dog lover. A sci-fi and horror aficionado (and Alien at that). Sounds like my type of man.
Do you happen to know if he preferred the 50s version or the 80s version of The Thing?
If I had to guess, I’d say he preferred the ’50s version, but I found both versions in his VHS collection. Of course, he also had a whole subcategory of Kurt Russell movies, so I can’t be sure.
Aw, Suzanne, I totally get it. Next month my mom will have been gone for 12 years, and it is absolutely stuff like this I miss most. I still see funny or interesting little things that make me think “ooh, gotta tell Mom about that.”
I lost my brother in 2002, so 2012 was a ten-year anniversary for me too. You’re right about the little things that you wish you could talk to a loved one about. I wish I could share my current revival of my roleplaying hobby with my brother, who was a gamer of all sorts, both tabletop and video. I put a marker in a local cemetery (he was cremated) that says “A finite player in an infinite game” in Latin.