Today marks the 40th anniversary of the day my Daddy died.  As much as I love summer, the month of July is always bittersweet. It somehow seems wrong that in this season of long lazy days and hot forever nights, of fireflies and  full moons,  of cricket songs and bullfrog lullabies, of loving and living and soaking up the sun, there was the sadness of letting go.  Each year on this day, if only for a little while, I invite the 5-year-old  me to come out and take a look around, catch her breath, and try to understand.  She’s come a long way. What was once a day to dread has proven it can just as easily be a day of unexpected magic, serendipity and possibility. And really, for the most part, aren’t they all?

I wrote the essay below in 1994. It was the first piece I wrote for myself that wasn’t a journal entry or a college paper. I submitted it to Glamour magazine and received in response my first rejection letter. Handwritten below the letter was a note from the rejector’s secretary telling me that she’d lost her dad young too, was deeply affected by my story, and hoped I’d continue writing.

The woman who wrote this 15 years ago isn’t the woman I am today, however, I’m printing this as I wrote it then, in honor of my Daddy, who I know for a fact is always around; for my sisters and my mom and stepdad, because we know how far we’ve all come; for my friends, who have loved and laughed with me through even the shitty times, who always saw more in me than I saw in myself and made sure I saw it too; and for me, who really is probably more “hippie” than uptight mainstream professional these days.  I earned it, I like it . . . yaaahhh! for that.

Poolside.

Lying by the pool, soaking up the summer sun, I am content.  Languishing, relaxed, my eyes are closed, and I am captive to the sensation of the heat dancing on my skin.  I am oblivious to everything going on around me except for the slap of the water on the sides of the pool and occasional bits of muted conversation and laughter.

Then I hear the little girl’s cry:  “Daddy, watch!”  And even in the July heat, cold shivers run over my flesh.  I look up to see a child about five years old playing in the water.  She hold her nose, puts her head under, and comes up laughing, pleased with herself and eagerly looking to her father for approval.  He smiles and turns back to his friends, barely acknowledging her, leaving her with only herself for company.  I see a look of sadness, embarrassment, and shame slip across her face.  Or maybe I only imagined it as I’ve felt that way myself so often over the past 25 years.

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The summer of ‘69.  The summer of love, Woodstock, Hurricane Camille, man’s landing on the moon, and Charles Manson’s helter skelter.  “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” was the top tune, “Easy Rider” was the number one movie and the Vietnam war was at its tumultuous peak.  Tune in, turn on and drop out was the nation’s anthem.  At five, I was much too young to be involved in flower power and protests to give peace a chance.  My world revolved around Barbie, Mr. Bubble, and Bobby Sherman.

I suppose I loved my father, too, but I don’t really remember much about that.  When you are a child, life centers on, and is no longer than, each individual day to which you wake.  There is no comprehension of time or of its passing, no comprehension of disease, no comprehension of death, no comprehension of forever.  So when daddy died July 10, 1969, after a two-year battle with leukemia, it meant little or nothing to me that he was “gone to heaven” and “wouldn’t be back.”  As I lay beside my older sister sobbing herself to sleep that night, I was ashamed that I felt no urging to cry.  It took years for me to realize the depths to which I was affected by a man I hardly even know.

More than anything, the loss of my father was an impediment I tried to ignore. I watched my friends with their dads and wondered what I was missing.  Early on I learned to bury my embarrassment when classmates and friends discovered I was fatherless.  Going to high school in the late seventies, I felt an underlying stigma attached to living in a house that was glaringly empty of a man’s strong presence—-it was “One Day at a Time” too close to home.

From the beginning, my sisters and my mom and I never discussed daddy’s death.  To mention it would have shown the weakness and vulnerability to emotion that seemed to be forbidden.  The presence of the absence was there, though, and we lived in an atmosphere of uneasiness, bitterness and distrust.  My older sister yelled and screamed her frustrations, my younger sister was more of a silent rebel.  I somehow assumed responsibility for calming the storms that arose in the way of temper tantrums, rebellions and outright fights.  My ability to turn it all inside and keep it to myself invariably helped me to develop a keen sense of self-awareness, but I have had to fight hard against the depression that accompanies such intense introspection.

If there is confidence and attitude within me, I have fought to put them there, and they are the reward of my own doing.  Still, they share a space with the resentment that my five-year-old self has not yet been able to resolve:  my daddy didn’t love me enough to stay alive.  Now, at 30, I know this isn’t true, that his life was taken by a disease he was determined to beat.  Yet even after 25 years, time does not heal.  I do not look easily into people’s eyes because I do not want to reveal the sadness that hides within my own.  I do not feel like I belong in any particular place, do not feel like I fit any particular mold of personality.

I no longer blame my mother for these circumstances, though I did for quite a long time.  She was widowed, at 27, with three daughters to raise in a small town where she had lost the safe, traditional role of wife and homemaker.  She was forced to handle the confusion and chaos alone, and she did her best while attempting to deal with her own pain.  We as her children were dragged through years of innumerable changes of which we had no understanding or control.  By the time I reached 16 and my mom remarried I was too old for a “daddy.”  Consequently, I bury deep within myself a woman who never knew the love of that first all-important male, the stability of a solid family or the self-esteem that comes with knowing you are valued.

I barely know this man I cry for, yet I can no longer attempt to deny my father’s existence any more than I can continue to anticipate his return.  He has become a juxtaposition of a few faded memories transposed on the gruesome image I hold of his body rotting away in the ground.  I still see my father being loaded into the ambulance pulled up to our porch, its red lights flashing off the walls of our living room where I stood and watched.  From time to time I am haunted by the dream of an evil presence looming over that house.  It shuts me inside and I cannot escape, no matter how hard I try.

I have been cheated; I know there was more to him than this.  He played along with me when I told him I wanted to go to “princess school” and marry a prince.  He convinced me to eat frog legs by telling me it was chicken.  He bought us a dachshund for Christmas and named him Max.  He made me angry when he forced me to stop sucking my thumbs.  He used to drive me around the yard on the riding lawn mower.  He knew how to get us to behave without saying a word by snapping his thick policeman’s belt.  The night my little sister was born he picked me up in a blanket and carried me to the car for the drive to the hospital.  I do not remember much, but I remember this.

He was a Virginia state trooper and dedicated to making something of himself.  He was a man devoted to his family.  He was a husband, and he was a father.  He was my father.  His name was Kenny, and he was my father.  I can say it a thousand times and none of them will change a thing.  He was barely 30 and knew he was dying.  He knew he would never see his girls graduate, pursue careers, marry, have children.  He knew he would not see us grow up.  How did he cope?

I’m not sure in his absence that we became the women he would have expected us to be.  All three of us married, all three divorced.  I suspect that my sisters have experienced the same problems with their personal and professional lives as I, but I speak only for myself when I say that his death nearly succeeded in robbing me of a sense of purpose or direction. It is as though permanence never existed and stability somehow eludes.

Years before he became ill, my father commented that when he died, he wanted to be remembered for never having done anything to hurt anyone.  He could not have known then that it was his death that would hurt us most of all.  I am angry; angry that he is gone when there are so many people worse than him still living, angry that life goes on and that my generation is now his age, angry that the whole world lives like he never even existed.  His life, like the story in a book, only exists when someone cares enough to open the pages and read what is inside.  I will not let him sit on a shelf, dusty and forgotten.

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It is growing late, and a full moon lingers overhead.  Its yellow light glows brightly in contrast to the craters on its surface.  It is luminous, and it washes over me as I sit in the midst of the darkness.  Though the little girl and her father have gone I do not feel alone.

“Daddy, watch.”  I never had the chance to say those words to him or show him how I could swim, run, play.  I never told him how much I loved him or how much I have missed his presence in my life.  He was gone before I even realized how much I needed him here.

I am leaving soon and moving to Los Angeles, and I am terrified.  But maybe, if there is anything at all to be gleaned from daddy’s dying, perhaps it is the solace that I have become so determined to make my own life worth living.  I know I can trust my own strength, seek my own challenges, and face the choices and changes ahead.  I have seen the darkness, and I prefer the sun.

Daddy, watch.

Summer 1994

Daddy Was Around carved in bench. 1995