Meghan McCain and I shared our fathers with America, and America felt our grief

It’s a strange dance, grieving on the world stage. I watched Meghan McCain closely this week; I felt every tear and every caught breath. I knew well the edge she was living on — the awareness that the world was watching and the moments of surrendering to the sorrow that will change her life forever. Her eulogy at his memorial service on Saturday captured all of it — a daughter’s loss as well as the solemn responsibility to own and acknowledge that her father belonged to America, too. Grief is a soft place to rest, but it is also fierce and bold and raw with truth.

I laughed through tears when she told the story of her father making her get back on a horse after she fell off. My father did the same thing, although I was less injured than she was. Both my father and John McCain, who were good friends, imprinted on their daughters the most vital of lessons — when you fall down, you get back up. You don’t give in to fear.

For all the years that I resented America for claiming my father, for winning at what I have dubbed my sibling rivalry with a country, I was so grateful to have the tears of a nation joined with ours as we laid my father to rest. It was like a million arms were holding me above the water line. As we made our final journey back across the country, my father’s flag-draped coffin in the plane with us, I said to my mother, “I wish we could just keep flying around like this. Maybe we could stop in some other cities and have some more services.”