Eventually

I wrote the following piece for my company’s bi-annual Memorial Gathering to honor those who have died with our hospice. The theme for this season’s services is “The Light of Love.” The first section focuses on “The Light of Remembrance,” which inspires the piece.

In the summer of 1977 my father died. I remember the day as being rainy and very cold, but in reality it was a hot and humid Florida summer day. I guess my little girl mind was so overcome with grief that the only way to describe a day when you lose someone you desperately love is to think of it as being cold and dreary with dark clouds crying. That is the funny thing about remembering the past—we are always looking back at it through a particular lens. I saw that day through the lens of pain and loss for so long that the day itself became transformed to match the feelings.

I also look back and remember holding Daddy’s hand, as he and Mother would lift me up over the curb, swinging me back and forth. I remember seeing his arms outstretched to me, as I would scoot down the high slide at the park by his office. I remember the look on his face when he opened my door to find Kelly Grey and I sitting on the red carpet with the pink ceramic pig smashed into a million pieces.

Kelly lived just six houses from mine, and we were born exactly three weeks apart. We would walk the grass of our neighbour’s front lawns to get to one another’s homes safely. Our parents had taught us to do this, so we were full of four-year old confidence. Somehow we decided this particular day that she would come to my house, but we neglected to ask my napping Mother—out of kindness, of course. As we sat in my room, she asked me how much money was in the pig. We decided to count the money, but alas the pig did not have an opening on the bottom, and the small slot on top did not send the money back to us when we shook it. I offered to go and fetch my tiny hammer from the garage. Daddy bought it for me, so I could “help” him with his household “Honey-Do-Lists.” I marched out to the garage where he was working at his tool bench, took down the hammer, and replied to his inquiry about needing any help with a simple “no thanks.”

Daddy had not had a four-year old in the house in over sixteen years, so it took an extra moment for him to comprehend that there was no need for me to have the hammer that would be qualified as “good”—which also proved to be just enough time for Kelly and I to smash the pig to smithereens. So there we sat on the floor of my bedroom with one dead ceramic pig, one hammer, countless change, and one Daddy staring down at us saying, “What in the world!? Kelly, where did you come from? Does your Mother know she is here?” He had that look I knew as meaning I was in T.R.O.U.B.L.E. He also had the mischievous smirk around his eyes of appreciating my ingenuity. He would know…I got my ingenious and mischievous nature from him!

You may wonder how it is that I remember all these little details of my ever too brief six years with Daddy. The answer comes from my Mother, who never shied away from talking about him and from keeping the light of remembrance stoked within me. She would ask me, “Do you remember when we met Daddy for lunch?” or “Do you remember going on the boat and catching your first fish at the marina?” She kept the memories alive—she kept Daddy alive—even when it must have cut her heart to a million pieces to have to do so. I know she wanted to go to bed and never get up because her heart was so full of agony and loss. My Grandmother had to take her in hand and tell her to get up because I needed her. Being a widow herself, she also promised my mother that she would stop crying all the time—“eventually.”

I am sure Mother wanted to forget sometimes—to forget all the love, laughter, happiness, touch and connection she had with him—because the forgetting might make the pain less. Instead, she held onto my Grandmother’s promise that “eventually” the pain would lessen, “eventually” she would not be crying all the time, and “eventually” she would invest in her own life again. In holding onto that promise, she kept Daddy’s love alive for me by reinforcing all of my memories of him.

Now when we talk of Daddy, we light up with the remembering. He is ever close, ever dear, ever loved. When I drive her nuts by announcing just exactly how we will be going about accomplishing a particular task—step-by-painful-step where she is merely an extra pair of hands—she shakes her head and says, “Just like your father…you are just like your father.” When I tease her or say something terribly funny she says, “Just like your father.” In fact, it has become quite the joke between us. Mother will compliment me on something and I will with deadpan delivery tell her, “Well you know, I get that from Daddy.“ She just shakes her head and laughs! When we are with other people and they comment on how bright I am, we look at each other, giggle and chime together, “She gets that from her father!” We both know how much her love and care for me has shaped me, but in those little moments we bring forward into our lives right now the love, humor and intelligence of a man who has been dead over thirty years. We keep him alive within us, which makes him a real person to even those who never had the honor of meeting him.

Remembering the one you love who has died is a precious flame within you, but you may at times be afraid that it will burn you. I want to encourage you today that the light of remembrance can only illuminate your life and warm your soul. I know because eventually that is what the light of remembering my own lost loves has become.