Juneteenth

Yesterday was my father’s birthday. He would have been 80 this year……if cancer had not killed him.

I started to write a letter to him yesterday, but I just could not do it. Even after almost 13 years, his loss is still so fresh for me. Like a wound that keeps breaking open.

I did not bake a cake and celebrate his birth with my kids. I didn’t jump in my car and drive to the metroplex to put flowers on his grave. Quite frankly, that would have pissed him off. “Wasted money and time” I can hear him say.

To give you an idea of how frank and dry his wit could be, when he was sick and in the middle of chemo, Bill and I sat talking with him at home. Everyone in our family had tiptoed around the topic of death. No one had dared broach the subject since his diagnosis. Dad and I had a special bond, and used to spend mornings all through my life talking. I am so happy that I took the time to actually listen to my father. I shudder to think of what I would have missed and been unable to pass down to my kids had I been more interested in being heard than hearing.

That day, I turned to him and said “Dad, what if this chemo doesn’t work. What if you die? How do you feel about that?”. I saw Bill nod his approval across the room. My dad looked me square in the eye and said “You know, no one has asked me that yet. Hmmm. Well girl , you will need to bury me first, because I might start to smell after awhile”. He then went on to say that he had lived a good life, and that mom was taken care of and he was ready to go if it was his time.

Six weeks later he was gone.

He was a man of extreme intellegence, quick wit, and a huge capacity for love.

No, I didn’t celebrate his birthday this year. I did that the first year he was gone…..I went for a run on the Galveston seawall, and afterwards sat on the jetties , cried, toasted my father and drank a beer. I threw one out into the water symbolically for him. Yes, I wasted a good beer, Dad. Get over it.

This year, I went for a run along the coast here. It was on the 16th, 3 days before his birthday. I was listening to my iPod, the song Billy Gray by Robert Earl Keen was playing. Half way through the song is a mandolin solo, and it was at that point I had to stop, bend over and sob, because my father played the mandolin for us on an instrument made by his uncle. He would bring it down from the top of the fireplace in the evening, and my brother, sister and I would gather at his feet to hear him play.

I sobbed and remembered him on the 16th. It was on September 16th that he went to be with his Lord….born again into heaven.

His birthday 80 years ago granted me the privilege of being his daughter, but I remember the 16th of each month as the day his suffering was over and he had peace.

I love you Dad and I miss you so much.