Three Truths and 20 Years

He is gone. 20 years ago tomorrow evening, on September 23, my life irreversibly changed forever. Dramatic? Maybe. But when your world turns upside down in an instant, I think I am entitled to a bit of drama.  For pete’s sake humor me.

Go to a dictionary and look up the phrase, ‘daddy’s girl’. There you will see my shining face staring back at you. Ok, not REALLY, but I was…… in spades. We were 2 peas in a pod. We thought alike (though it was my baby sis, his other daddy’s girl, who received the bulk of the brilliance DNA), reacted the same, had many of the same interests, and sadly….even looked alike. Just what every girl wants, to look like her daddy. So much so he called us Peat and Repeat and teased me that when I got older I would go bald and grow a beard. Joy.

His was the lap I crawled into over some break up, the voice I heard when he would call me at my work during the day, the one who came upstairs to teach me how to dance before my first boy/girl event. He is the one who pulled the car into the garage and made me take all 4 tires off and put them back on, the one I would get up with and watch CBS Sunday morning with, and the dad who went to Hallmark on his own and bought stacks of ‘thinking of you’ cards to send to me in college several times a week.

He was opinionated and stubborn (that TOTALLY skipped me…not).

And let me tell you, when we had a disagreement, it often times ended with my sweet mama dragging us both into the den and the scene would play out like this:

Mama speaking: “Ok now, face each other. Say “I’m sorry.” No, say it like you mean it. Now hug. A little tighter.  Ok, be nice to each other and go to Dairy Queen for some ice cream.” (true story)

So, with my daddy’s unexpected passing, we were completely gobsmacked. Decimated. Pulverized. How did this man, who was larger than life, just disappear?

The recovery was brutal and hard and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But as time passes, whether you want to or not, you get used to the new normal. It took a long, long time to reach acceptance of the situation. I mean, YEARS. And through these past 20 years, as with any big or small event, there are things you accept to be true. Some may not be apparent at first, but with time and acceptance they have become more and more evident.

Humankind is GOOD.

Watching the news today, society appears to be a mess and ‘evil’ exists everywhere. But we also have incredible good that can often be forgotten in the 24 hour daily news cycle. Looking at 9/11, where we witnessed incredible heroism by ordinary people, our faith is restored.

I’ve already described what happened the night with my daddy in “Psssst….Can you Hear Me?” so I’m not going to rehash that again, but that evening I witnessed my own heroes in action.

It was all the nameless faces that made that horribly tragic evening ‘work’. It was the lady who stopped her car in the street and offered to take over the mouth to mouth for me so I could focus on his chest compressions. It was the teenage boys who, without being asked, took their t-shirts off and literally stuffed them under our knees to relieve the pain of the concrete digging into them. It was the lady who jumped in her car, ran without knocking into my parents’ house, and told my mama she needed to come immediately. And it was the lady, who loaded us in her car and drove us to the ER and stayed with us until the pronouncement of my daddy’s demise. All nameless faces. Those people are my heroes. On that evening, a group of people came together in almost perfect symphony for a family they barely knew, if they even knew us at all.

So rather than focus on all the negative that is thrown at us, I choose to look for the goodness in this world. It is a choice. It’s not always an easy choice but if you look for it, you will see the glimmers shining through everywhere. Faith restored on a daily basis.

I was exactly where I needed to be.

In the months after, along with the extreme guilt (What if I had done the CPR better?) and shock and sadness (Why did he have to die?), I was ANGRY (Why me? Why put me in the position? Lord, what did I do to deserve that kind of punishment?). And it went on and on and on. I am ashamed to admit I had a crisis of faith and stopped praying all together. I mean, what God would do this?????

A colleague of my dad’s wrote me a wonderful letter a few days after his passing. And at first, I read it, I saw the words, but I didn’t hear them. I have kept that letter, and periodically I have pulled it out to read over the years. And through the years, I had started to HEAR what he was saying. And combine that with prayer, I have come to the conclusion I was exactly where I needed to be when I needed to be.

Was I a ‘chosen one’? Absolutely not. It’s just that the stars aligned, God’s will at work, or by ‘chance’ I was there. Take any or take all of those options. What it boils down to is that at the very end, before my daddy collapsed, he reached out for me. And thankfully, it spun me around fast enough I was able to break his fall. And though he was no longer physically there, he was THERE. And all the love he gave ‘his girls’ in our lives came out in that moment in the attempts to keep him here with us.

So my question has changed from “Why me?” to “Why not me?” What started out as being one of my greatest tragedies in life has ending up being one of my greatest blessings.

And FINALLY (I am almost done, I promise!), the most IMPORTANT one.

I didn’t need to say “Good-bye”.

Odd, huh? I didn’t feel the need to say good-bye?

Despite my parents’ missteps, and ALL parents make them, the one thing they completely knocked out of the ballpark was letting my baby sis and I know we were loved. And we knew it on a daily basis. We were raised that it wasn’t enough to ‘just know’. You needed to show it and speak it. Whether it being my parents yelling upstairs from the entryway, “I love you aborigines!” or the notes of encouragement in my lunch when I was punished to SAC in high school (never skipped class again….) ……we knew. We never left the house without saying it. And they weren’t just words. They were words we LIVED by.

Daddy would tell us, “Everything we have and do could be gone tomorrow, but that won’t change who we are and what we mean to one another,” and THAT was the God’s honest truth.

If the good Lord had come to me and said, “He is mine in 60 seconds. On your mark, get set, go”, there is not one thing I could have said to that man that wasn’t said or shown on a daily basis.

I didn’t need to say good-bye. He already knew.

So, twenty years have gone by and his presence and love have stayed with me as if I saw him 20 minutes ago. He is loved, and he is missed, and I thank God every day that HE gave me ‘The Don’ to be my daddy.

I love you Pop.