10.11.2013

Dear Dad

Dear Dad,
Just this morning you left peacefully in your sleep. I felt a rush of numbness when I read the news from Amy, then talked Lisa and cried. She made me feel better like only a big sister can. I am grateful for the on-line communication we had and phone conversations in recent months. I wrote a letter 6 days ago I never posted........

***

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Dear Dad,

I never stopped wondering about you growing up. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see you every day. I imagined the sports we would play together and created an image in my mind that has never left me. I daydreamed of this image often when bored at school or alone in my room wishing you were the one sitting in the living room. I always felt a part of me was missing; distant and incomplete. You were that part of me. Unknown. Unreachable.

I remembered that image I created as a girl last night clear as day. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I remember it and I want to paint it for you with my words.

We are standing in a field on a slightly breezy day. We are playing catch, but I cannot see the type of ball we are using. Is it a baseball? Football? Tennis ball? There are no other items around us or in our hands and the kind of ball doesn’t matter. It’s just me and you and we are smiling. There is a soft golden glow and there are tall stalks of yellow grass waving in the soft wind around us. I am very young, maybe 5 years old, and I am wearing an old fashioned dress that also flies gently in the breeze along with my hair. I see no trees around and we are both so happy and carefree. You are also young maybe in your 20s with a genuine smile.  It’s such a safe place; happy and endless in time.

When I went to see you for the first time that my memory can recall, I was 17. You told me you always loved me and missed me terribly. I believed you. I felt it when you said it. You told me a song always made you think of us by Eric Clapton called ‘Tears in Heaven’.  You wondered if we would know you if we saw you in heaven. 
With your health declining and the end of your time on earth approaching faster than any of us would like, I just know it’s going to be like my image when I see you next. We will get to make up for lost time. Time will be endless and we will be smiling. And playing catch, apparently.