mrockwell | FOR MY DAD, WITH LOVE AND SO MUCH GRATITUDE

My dear friend and writing partner Jeff Mariotte once said that writers think "not in the head but through the hands...To organize our ideas, we need to put them down where we can see them. That may be why we became writers in the first place - to find out what we think of the world around us."

So that's what I'm doing today, turning to the keyboard to help me understand the world.

See, my dad died today. It wasn’t unexpected – he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer back in 2011 and put up a hell of a fight. But a few months ago, the doctors told him there was nothing more they could do for him, and he declined pretty steadily after that. I even went up to see him last month, to say goodbye, because I knew it was getting close and I wouldn’t be able to be by his bedside when it happened.

So, I knew it was coming, and I even welcomed it, because he was wasting away and was a shadow of his former self and really seemed to just want to go home. And I didn’t want to see him suffer, not for my benefit or for anyone else’s.

But the call that I’ve been waiting for all these months still caught me off-guard, like when you’re going upstairs in the dark, and miscount the steps, and your foot comes down on a riser you expect to be there, but isn’t. That falling sensation, the instant of panic, of blind fear.

Or like when that guy you’ve been dating for years answers your phone call one day with, “Oh, it’s you,” and you realize that stab to the heart you just felt was the end of your relationship.

Or when your son’s doctor calls to tell you he has a mass growing in his abdomen, and you need to get him to the hospital immediately, if not sooner.

Shock. Fear. Anger. Guilt.

Hurt.

I didn’t really know my father growing up. He was an alcoholic back then – my first memory is of him hitting me when my mother sent me to wake him out of a drunken stupor. I was three.

My parents divorced soon after that, and I only saw him a couple of times in the intervening years, and phone calls were only slightly less rare. He didn’t come to either of my weddings – my mother walked me down the aisle the first time, and I walked by myself the second, and I told myself I didn’t really miss him.

But, somehow, things changed between us. He got religion and sobered up; I had a family and grew up. The phone calls started to become more regular. Birthday cards would show up at about the right time. He came to visit the year my husband got deployed to Iraq. Somehow, without us ever really talking about it, we reconciled, and I had a dad again. For a few too-brief years, I got to enjoy as an adult what I'd never had as a child - a positive male role model, a link to my past, and, finally, the thing I'd always longed for - a proud papa.

And now he's gone. There won't be any more calls from Dad, with his smiling face lighting up my iPhone. No more birthday cards, late or otherwise. No more visits. Ever. And knowing that breaks my heart into a million aching pieces, steals my breath from my lungs, makes me want to scream and rail at God and go curl up in a ball with my teddy bears and sleep for a hundred years.

But...I had him for a while. In the end, I had a dad who loved me, and was proud of me, and wasn't afraid to let me know it. And having gone without that for so long, I know what a blessing it truly was, and I am so, so grateful for it. And for him.

I love you, Dad. Thank you for everything. Rest easy, and I'll see you down the road a ways.

Requiem Aeternam dona eis, Domine
et lux perpetua luceat eis:
Requiescant in pace. Amen.