Getting Past The Pain

My father died 28 years ago. I was a quiet 19 year old girl barely starting out in life. I still lived home with 4 of my siblings and my parents. My dad was our strength. He was our support and courage.

My dad was driving home from a school board meeting that fateful Thursday night when a brain aneurysm we knew nothing about burst in his head. Saturday they pulled the plug after declaring him brain dead.

I had last seen him that Thursday morning before I took off for work. When I returned that evening he had already left for his meeting. It was a normal night for me… until the knock at the door.

There stood a man we knew very well. His family helped us cut firewood many Saturdays. Just down the road from his house my father had been in a car accident. He came to take my mother to the hospital to see him.

There’s a lot of things that are still a blur to me. In the days to come I would learn that my best friend’s mom was the one who came upon the accident and I would learn what a brain aneurysm was. The night of the accident I slept with the phone next to me at the kitchen table waiting for word, any word, that he would be okay

I prayed. I asked God to work a miracle and bring my Dad back to me. Christmas was only days away. I didn’t know how to go on without my dad. He was my rock. I was scared. I knew my mom didn’t know how to handle life without him. Responsibility would fall upon me.

It did. He never came out of the coma. I never saw him alive again after that Thursday morning. In one day I went from being an innocent 19 year old girl to being a responsible 19 year old adult. I grew up overnight and lost my childhood. My mother and 5 siblings needed my support.

I don’t regret that. I hold no resentment toward that either. From the time I was a child, I knew that I was put on this earth as a natural nurturer. The maternal instinct within me is strong and I was falling into the role I was placed on earth to do.

But I never got a chance to say goodbye. I never had time to mourn or to grieve or to let him go. And now, 28 years later, all that pain is still within me. Still hurting and festering.

Spiritually I have always felt my father’s presence in my life. I know there have been moments when he let me know he was here. Sometimes it would be in a rarely heard phrase that he always used suddenly being overheard. Or a song by his favorite singer, Hank Williams. There were always little signs he was close by.

But I need to let his physical presence go. I’ve never done that. I’ve never taken time to cry and say goodbye. So now, after all these years, all that old pain is open and new again as I revisit his death and begin to grieve the way I should have before.

I wrote him a letter. I told him how I felt. How it hurt to lose him. I told him how lost and alone I felt. How I still do feel sometimes. I cried, sobbed as I wrote that letter. Tonight, as I type this post, I am crying again. Tears are rolling down my cheek.

I miss my dad. He is gone. I can’t bring him back and I have to let him go. But it does bring comfort to know that even though his physical presence has left, spiritually he can still bring me comfort and support.

One day I will be healed and these tears will fall no more. Until then, I readily accept these tears knowing that they mean I loved. I loved hard.
And I was loved as well.