july 5th. the day we lost my dad.
i've prayed, since that day, that i would be graceful after having my heart blown apart. i've watched others in my life who've experienced their own turmoil. it has either left them angry and disillusioned or they've walked away as if they had been refined by the fire into something more beautiful. i wanted the latter for myself... i figured if i could do my best to remain reflective that i could choose to be graceful.
besides, being angry doesn't work very well for me. i'm not a very good angry person.
so as the anniversary rolls around again this year, three years later, i find myself suddenly flooded with memories of him. and i have to choose to be as graceful as i can since i've found it best to go ahead and let myself remember them... because for me, feeling is better than stuffing my emotions down and not dealing with them.
my dad was a truck driver and on the road most of my life. he'd come home on weekends but often we'd go two or three weeks without seeing him. however, not one day went by without me knowing how much my dad missed me and loved me. he called every night just to hear our voices. as the years went by and we got older, he started finding more local jobs. by the time i was in college he was home every weekend. no matter what his job situation was... whether over the road for weeks at a time, or his brief two year stint as a stay at home dad doing carpentry work on the side... he loved his family with great passion and conviction.
so as you can imagine, when my dad was home, we soaked it up. my family was never much for doing activities out and about together. our time was mostly spent at home in each others company. i'm still very much that way. i'd prefer to have friends over for dinner and a great conversation rather than "go out". we'd spend time helping my dad wash his truck, watch movies together and play in the backyard... which was like his own little oasis. my dad had a knack for creating spaces all over our house... but i say this tongue in cheek because some of his spaces are either a little strange or a little unsafe. one time i came home from college and my house was covered with wood... like the kind you build a 6 foot fence with. while i was busy dying of embarrassment, my dad claimed that he had made our home look like a cabin and that nobody else had a house like ours. he was quite proud of this feat.
well... i guess he was right... nobody did.
the first time i brought kjaer to my parents house i was just "dropping by" because we were out and about. i had gotten used to the cabin thing so i was no longer embarrassed by it. at least i could shrug it off with a giggle. but we pulled up and my wooden house had been stained orange. i swear it looked like an enormous dorito. my dad had decided it was time to re-do the stain and apparently it was a little orange-er than he expected... so he just went with it.
i wanted to crawl under my dashboard and die.
"here, handsome guy that i have a terribly huge crush on... here is my parents bright orange house."
my dad did many of these "renovations" to our house... putting up decks that weren't to code, building a pond in our backyard with a waterfall that ran on a sump pump, spackling our ceiling and then using a vacuum cleaner to blow sparkles up so that our ceiling would look "cool". the list goes on. and trust me, if it showed on the outside of our house... there was always that one neighbor who turned him in to the city of aurora for code violations. we don't know exactly who it was that had it out for my dad... but we had some good guesses. of course, now that he's gone you kind of appreciate these cooky little things he did... like the window in the fence so that the breeze would come through to the makeshift hammock he built. everything had a purpose. he was king of his little cooky castle... and we were his loving and loyal subjects
my dad had a sense of humor too. in high school, i had three neighborhood friends who were more like sisters. one sweet girl came to my house one day and my dad greeted her with a huge grin. he then proceeded to open his mouth as wide as he could and let his dentures fall down from the top row of his teeth. she screamed, "MR. TODACK!" and ran out the front door. he just laughed and laughed. of course... this became his new favorite game with her... chasing my friend around with his dentures falling out of his mouth.
ahhhh... a day in the life of the todack's. and some of you wonder why i'm so strange!
some dear friends of ours got married a couple of weekends ago and that got me thinking about weddings. i LOVED our wedding. it was so us. but there was one thing that i had always dreamed we'd have that we didn't.
dancing.
my dad LOVED to dance. he was that kind of dad who had you stand on his feet while he waltzed around the dance floor. i've spent many a family wedding on top of his dress shoes, giggling and spinning with my sweet daddoo. even later, when i was in my 20's, my dad couldn't resist and he'd pull me out to the dance floor. no matter how shy, awkward or bashful i was, he'd ignore it and dance with his daughter. after kjaer and i got engaged... one of my first wedding plan decisions was to NOT have dancing. i knew kjaer would agree with that anyway... he hates dancing. plus, a 6'4" man might look a little funny dancing with a 5'3" woman. but selfishly, the decision was for me. the thought of having a dance floor without my dad to dance with me was just too painful to bare.
and by the way, i don't regret that it was missing. i think the dance floor would have emphasized the already gaping wound that my family bore so courageously on one of the happiest days of my life. in fact... i remember my mom looking at kjaer's family laughing and smiling and having a great time at our wedding and asking me why we weren't acting like that. my mom and i were posing for pictures at the time and she was probably feeling a little naked without her partner in crime. i said, "because daddy's not here... he's the missing piece that makes our family whole."
back to dancing...
i was reflecting on this "missing" piece from my wedding... when i suddenly remembered that i HAD my wedding father daughter dance with my dad. it was just a year earlier than expected. it was a couple of days after kjaer had asked me to marry him. as most of you know, my father was thrilled. he was in a hospice care center by now. the medication they had him on made it impossible for him to talk. you couldn't understand a word he'd be saying... which i'm sure was terribly frustrating for him when he had a clear mind. i had come to bring my family some dinner. we hated leaving him alone there... so we went in shifts.
anyways... kjaer and i came that day to bring qdoba. we were all laughing and talking. my dad was just sitting there quietly. i don't remember how it came up... but i started singing a country song my dad had written and recorded in a Tennessee studio during his younger days. (he would have been a great country singer). i could tell by his eyebrows that he was quite impressed that i remembered each lyric... as i did my best to fake a southern drawl. suddenly, my dad waved me over to him. i walked over to him and he motioned to help him up. i didn't quite know what was happening... with my dad you just obey.
and then he wrapped his arms around me and started swaying and humming to me.
we were dancing.
for the life of me, i wish i could remember what he was humming.
all i know, is i got my father-daughter dance. i kept my head over his shoulder so he wouldn't see my tears. he and i knew, as did every other person in that room, that he wouldn't share that dance with me at my wedding. so this was it... and we both rocked back and forth in a moment suspended in time.
the depths of my dads love for us still baffles me. i'm sitting here looking at my sleeping son and thinking about how every day i love him more and more. some days i feel like my heart is going to explode because it grows so rapidly. then, i'm reminded that there was a time when i was my daddy's baby girl and his love for me was brand new. imagine his love compounding upon itself, the way mine and kjaer's has been growing for leif, for 30 years and you have how much my dad loved me. he loved me so much that, in spite of the fact he was dying, he stood up and gave me my father daughter dance. he knew i'd be missing him on that big day... so he brought the dance floor from our future wedding to the present as a gift from him to me.
anniversaries of deaths are a little like the anniversaries of celebrations too. i remember that when kjaer and i were first dating i had little anniversaries in my head about every little thing. in fact, the night we first kissed was the eve of christmas eve in 2004. i'm sure i drove him crazy with this anniversary... but heck, i like to celebrate things.
so i could sit here this july 5th and mope. i could think about the pain of those last few weeks and the tragedies that happened to my dad and subsequently, me and my family. those things are still so close to the surface that they can bring me to tears just thinking of them. but i'd rather think of the other stuff. the other 29 and a half years of happy memories that i have about my dad... of orange wooden houses, crazy dentures, cool evenings by his pond, singing at the dinner table, 3 week trips with my family jam packed in his semi truck, and the way he danced with me... not just on that hot july day... but the way he danced with me throughout my life.
memories like that make it a little easier to try and be graceful.
Yep, definitely crying over here. What a beautiful tribute to your dad. He sounds like an amazing, hilarious, kind, wonderful man. And you are just like him.
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