Mulling Over Memories – Remembering My Dad

Early this week we lost my dad. It is hard to reconstruct exactly what happened. He had an infection in his leg last week; I’m not a physician, but it looked very bad. My brother and I both told him he needed to go the ER, but in the end, he did not. The following morning my brother found him in the garden and he had been gone some time. I don’t want to focus on his death here, but talk about his full life.

Dad was never the largest presence in my life and hadn’t been in my everyday life for a very long time. The last time I saw him was well over twenty years ago and only talked to him a few times a year. But, at the end of the day he was a very good guy and their is no denying that half my DNA and some of my learning about the world, in my formative years, would have come from him.

He was doing fairly well, given he was moving closer to the end of his seventies. He has been very fortunate health wise most of his life and I’m very glad he wasn’t horribly sick, like my mom was for her entire adult life. He was starting to show many signs of his years, as all of us do. All things considered he lived a fairly long life.

He grew up on a ranch with his parents and sister. He was full of stories about that. After college he served in the military in Europe and after finishing his obligations in the service he moved back to the United States. He became a pressman and at one point had a dream of having a printing company with my brother and me. He even made mock up business cards for that dream; I keep it in my memories box. Being a pressman didn’t work out, but he found his footing as an investigator for Colonial Williamsburg. He was well loved by his colleagues and eventually he retired from that work in his early seventies.

I have many great memories, from childhood, my tween years, into high school, and many memories from those times that aren’t great. Thankfully, most of my times with dad were awesome.

Early memories of Dad:

1. Riding in the back of the VW Beetle, with Mom & Dad, with the windows wide open, looking up through the glass hatch at the trees and sky going by above, all the while singing songs with Mom on the radio.
2. “Fixing” the car with him, which was really me holding a flashlight and handing tools to him for hours and hours, asking are we almost done every five seconds.
3. Fishing, which was really the two of us putting lines in water, very early in the morning, often with nothing to show for it, except that we had been with each other.
4. Dad playing the guitar and Mom singing.
5. My brother and I using sparklers in summer and my dad twirling two black widows on either end of a stick that he had just taken out of a stump.
6. The meals we had eating together and the celebrations, which as time went on lessened. You really miss those mundane things once they are gone.

He had to work incredibly hard to keep us afloat financially in my childhood and he had a very long drive just to get to work. Unfortunately, he had to continue to work harder than most, just to make ends meet, even after I was no longer living with them. As Mom grew sicker he had to work more. He was always a good provider and an attentive caregiver. He was always a helper, sometimes too much.

I don’t want this to be one of those memorial posts where you don’t know Dad was human. It could be difficult to get through dad’s “armor.” You could ask him a question, even a simple one, and not get answer. Ever. He was super messy and he collected way too much, I’m sure with good intentions, but often negative effects for others. His whole life he would loose track of time like time didn’t exist. Dad being late had to be expectation. He was very human.

He was very supportive when I came out, much more so than Mom ever thought of being. He was my brother’s best friend through my brother’s adult life. My brother is one of the people that will feel my dad’s absence the most.

Though he wasn’t a talker, my Dad was a great listener. He taught me to play chess. He taught me to research and cross examine, and to listen more than I talk.

The world will be a slightly dimmer place because he is gone, not because he was my Dad, but because he was a helper. And our world needs helpers now more than anything.