Daddy
Thirty years ago this month he died. He was fifty years old, I was twenty-one. I remember the details of his dying as if it happened yesterday, yet I can’t remember the sound of his voice. How that makes my heart ache.
He was handed his death sentence a year prior, but he kept it to himself; protecting us. That burden he carried for a year before his heart failed him for the last time. We didn’t know this until after he was gone. Some would say that was a selfish act on his part, that if he had told us we could have made that year incredible, but you see we were and still are a family of secrets, a fractured family of secrets.
Was I angry when I found this out? No, I was profoundly saddened by this fact. I thought how frightened he must have been, how brave he had to be, how alone he was in this final journey, waking each morning wondering if this was to be his last.
In the end he fought a valiant fight to stay with us, but even he knew it was not to be. I spoke with him privately the afternoon before he died and he told me he would not be coming home. I didn’t want to believe him. I told him I loved him and he said he loved me. This was our good-bye.
He died the next morning just as the sun was starting to rise. We were all with him, each of us telling him in our own way he could rest, that it was all right for him to go. His going was devastating. The sorrow is still with me as I’m sure it is with my siblings, my mother.
I can remember his face, although I have no pictures of him; his laugh which was a giggle, not a hearty belly laugh, but a giggle. But the actual sound of his voice, the tone, pitch, timber…I can’t recall at all.
I think of him often.
