The Letter

When I was 13 my father wrote me a letter. It was not over-long and it was not fancy. Hand-written in his heavy, block print with a black felt- tip pen on three sheets of a yellow legal pad; if you saw it lying around you would never guess the joy and anguish it had invoked over the last 25 years. It was given to me on the occasion that I first started menstruating. This milestone was a bit of a production in our house. When it was our turn, each of us girls got a new dress and a special dinner out with mom and dad at a 'grown-up' restaurant of our choosing and Daddy's letter. I sometimes wonder if he knew how we, his three daughters, would each cherish this special ritual we were treated to.

A Daddy's love, hopes, dreams and pride for his daughter put on paper. Heartfelt and simple, the letter became my most prized possession. It lived in a small lockbox along with a few other precious things; my own writings, (poems too raw to show another living soul), a dozen silver coins , sentimental odds & ends and a dog-eared copy of my favorite book. Nothing of real value, but to me, priceless.

I would occasionally take the letter from its place and read it over, remembering the happiness and love I felt when I received it. I never showed it to anyone, not my sisters, (I never saw their letters either), not my mother, (though I have often thought she must have read it before it was given), not a boyfriend or my best friend. It was mine alone. A little piece of my Daddy's heart I kept in a box.

When I was 20 the box was stolen. I knew who had taken it and tried many times to get it back, without success. I was heart broken. I could live without everything else but the letter was irreplaceable. It could not be recreated, for I was no longer 13 and Daddy was no longer the daddy of that 13 year old girl standing on the threshold of womanhood. He could, and did, write me other letters, but he could never write THAT letter again.

Time marched on, as it always does and I began to forget. I could no longer remember the exact order of the words. And soon the emotion behind the words started to slip away too and all that was left of my letter was faded memory and sadness.

Nineteen years later, driving back to Wichita from Oklahoma City, where we had left Daddy's body in the hands of a local funeral director, my baby sister Deena and I spoke of our letters for the first time. Her letter had come a few years after mine, was just as precious and happily for her, safe at home. We talked about what those simple words of pride and love had meant to each of us, still meant to us. She didn't know mine had been stolen, so I told her the story. As I lamented my loss, she listened sympathetically. The unfairness of that loss so many years ago weighed heavily, somehow compounding the inconceivable loss we had suffered together that day.

Later that evening sitting on the living room floor with Deena and our step-mom, we went through some of Daddy's things; boxes of mementos we'd brought up from the basement. Daddy was not much for holding on to the past, so there was precious little to see. But still we pulled each item from it's box and passed them around, telling stories, sharing memories from our respective chapters in his life. It was sad and funny and sweet and then it was... miraculous.

Near the bottom of one box, mixed in with old paystubs and birthday cards, I glimpsed the corners of a few yellow note pages. My heart skipped a beat and then stilled. There was no way it can be what I wanted so desperately for it to be. This day had already proved neither luck nor prayers were on my side. But still I reached for the corner and tugged it from the pile. Three pages, attached by the notepad's original adhesive and folded in quarters. I was holding my breath, the air suddenly heavy, the whoosh of blood in my ears.

When I glanced at Deena she was looking at me, her mouth just beginning to form a surprised "0". I unfolded the pages gently and saw the familiar shapes of his writing; heavy and black. And at the top of the first page, "Dearest Stacy,". My gasp was loud, followed immediately by a sob. Deena, wide-eyed, said, "No way!?" But I was crying, clutching my letter to my heart and she knew.

Unbelievably, he had saved the first draft of his letter to me, all these years. And on the very same day that I had lain sobbing on his cold, lifeless chest, listening in vain for a sign that somehow they were wrong and I was not too late, I got my little piece of his heart back.

Regret

When my father called, inconceivably just 14 months ago, and dropped the "Big C" bomb so nonchalantly, I was terrified. The possibility of my world without him flashed through my heart and rendered me emotionally paralyzed. But he was so certain that he would be in the 20% of people who survived the form he had. And when he was certain, about anything, he was hard to resist; politics, religion, justice or ethics, he had a way of debating his stance that left you without a leg to stand on and yet somehow happy to sit. So I relented under the onslaught of his consistently positive, no nonsense attitude, and after a pep talk from my husband, I tried hard to believe. On some level I even succeeded. I went around telling my friends and family that it was okay, because even if the worst happened, and of course there was no way it would, but if it did, I was blessed to have NO REGRETS about my dad. I told them that the nature of my relationship with my father was such, that if either of us died that day we would leave nothing unsaid between us. Can you even imagine the arrogance that takes!? To believe there was nothing left to say to one of your best friends, to your father?!

In fact, the regrets I have could fill a small home... and they do. I regret that I didn't drop everything and rush to his side and stay there until the end, whether 172 days or 20 years. I regret not thanking him for all he'd done for me, every time I spoke to him. I regret that I allowed him to convince me that my fear of the loss of him was ridiculous and unfounded. I regret that I was not there to hold his hand and talk to him through the long, boring hours of chemo and radiation. I regret that I didn't go to Disney World with he and his family. I regret that my boys didn't know him better. I regret that I took his presence in my life for granted for 38 1/2 years, believing that I had plenty of time to make up for the time we lost when I moved so far away. I regret that I didn't tell him more often how proud I was to be his daughter and blessed I was to be his friend. Oh, I regret. All of these things and so much more.

Above all I regret that I let the fear that he would see my fear and mistake it for faithlessness, quash my desire to call him every single day and tell him that I loved him. Just that, a simple "I love you" everyday.

Those who love those who are diagnosed are thrown into the second worst kind of emotional limbo. We must not say all the things we so desperately long to say to our beloveds, because to do so would lend credence to the possibility they will not survive, and our faith that their survival is not only possible but probable is essential to their fight and hence, their survival. And yet, we need to tell them, and they need to hear, that the loss of them would matter to us; that the prospect of a life without them is sad and lonely; that we would be changed by that loss because they are instrumental to us and most importantly, that they are loved by us.

It is a unique situation in which two completely opposite positions are both completely right. So regardless of the position taken, you are left holding a big, bulging bag of regret.

Sick and Tried

I know what you're thinking. "My goodness, will they just let any inarticulate, non-speller blog now? Is that what we've come to?" But no, I meant TRIED, not tired. I have been sick and I have been tried.

By sick, I mean SICK! Physically ill. The sickest I can remember being in years. The first time ever I've missed 6 days of work because of illness. That includes the birth of my children, no lie. Sick, sick, sick!

By tried, I mean my patience. Every day. By a mere boy, no less. A boy who is thoroughly, if naively, convinced he is a man. And at 13, he does unfortunately, look like a man and when his voice isn’t cracking, he even sounds like a man. And yet, he is so far from manhood he can't even see it through the swirling fog of hormonal angst, across the abyss-mal crevasse of adolescence, with its roiling river of molten anxiety raging far below, over and around the boulders of school, peer pressure and puberty; any one of which he might be painfully thrown against at any moment.

Now, his daddy and I are on the far side of the chasm, and we are supposed to be building the bridge this boy will strut across into the easy and carefree days of adulthood, (I don’t have the heart to tell him it only gets H-A-R-D-E-R!). But try as we might, we are clearly screwing it up magnificently. We are as blinded by the fog, abyss and smoking river of fear as he.

I know we are not the first parents and child to stand teetering on opposite sides of the canyon, shouting unintelligibly at each other. But we may as well be. Everyone who makes the journey has to build their own bridge. For a while, I thought the bridge my folks built, the one that carried me safely to adulthood, would still be passable. But alas, a troll has taken up residence there and we can’t answer his riddle. So each day we take our ineffectual tools and begin again to bang randomly on things in an attempt to create a conduit from where he is, to where we hope he will someday be. We do this while he yells loudly and quite confidently from the other side that he is already standing beside us.

Yes, my patience is well and truly TRIED!

Love Story

My baby has a girlfriend. He's 10. Until a year ago he still wanted to marry me when he grew up. I was his one and only true love. Then last school year he fell in 'love' with a little girl in his class. She was a sweetie pie, but he never told her how he felt and summer break cooled his adoration.
So this year school hadn't been in session for a week when he came home and informed me that Hannah had 'asked him out'. (What does it even mean when 10 year olds 'go out'?) I remembered a young lady named Hannah from his class last year, in fact I have a delightful little love letter from a Hannah to Jack that I will save forever in my memory box. "Yes" Jack tells me, "It's that Hannah". Two days later Jack asked his daddy if he could cut a Zinnia from the garden and take it to school for her. Then shortly after that he came home with a necklace she had given him.
I thought their little romance was the sweetest thing I'd ever seen. And that was even before I saw her picture.

Because when I did, I realized Hannah looks kind of like me. She has a beautiful smile that goes all the way to her eyes. She's cute, smart and nice . She is also short and a little round. And my boy, he gets all soft and gooey when he talks about her. The other day when I mentioned that she was not a tiny little thing like some of the young ladies in his class, he said to me, in the smiling, breathless way love often expresses itself, "And Mom, she has fat cheeks, too", squeezing his own cheeks in example.

And while I have loved him all along, somehow in that moment, I fell even more in love with this boy of mine. You see, he does not care; he doesn't care that she is chubbier than the girls his friends are 'going out' with; he thinks she is beautiful because she is chubby, not in spite it. And he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. He has a mind and heart of his own. What more could a momma ask for?

Trials

Sometimes life seems to gang up on a person. I have seen it often in the lives of friends and family. I have watched while they bent under the weight of the burdens life piled on them. I have loved them, sympathized with them, offered support when I felt I could help and given assistance when asked. But I have always felt blessed, (and if I'm honest, a tiny bit special), that I had not been so burdened myself.

I could not offer true empathy, because I had somehow made it to 38 years old without any real suffering in my own life. Oh, I had your run-of-the-mill obstacles thrown in my path from time to time. Heartaches and losses, some of them even seemed huge, when they were happening. But genuine, first hand sorrow and pain, I'd been spared.

Until August of last year. That's when my friend and father called to tell me he had cancer of the esophagus. One hundred and seventy-two days later he was gone.

Empathy comes easier now... it's the only thing that does.

Jubilation

Small doses. That's how it usually comes. In very small doses. But, oh, when it does come...so awesome. Like this tiny beauty. I met her the other day in the rose garden my husband lovingly tends. She was tucked in the lower petals of a gorgeous 'Double Delight', waiting. And I, not an arachnophobe, but certainly not a big fan, was smitten. I experienced a rejoicing in my spirit. And that joy, small as it was, was enough. Why you ask? Why should anyone rejoice in the discovery of a spider. I'm not sure I can explain, but I do want to try.

Have you ever been so broke, in financial straights so dismal, that finding a $10 bill in the old coat you put away for the summer feels like a windfall, like a genuine miracle? Have you ever found yourself so utterly alone, so hopelessly lonely, that a cheerful 'hello' from the mailman feels like a rope to a drowning man?

That spider is my $10 rope. She is a reminder, a much needed and just-in-time reminder, that I am not forgotten by the Him. That He still has His hand on me. Because I know a God who created such an amazing creature, perfect in her purpose, fierce in her survival, could not, would not, have done less for me. And that knowing brings joy.

A New Day

I thought I would start with something like a mission statement, which is what this poem is to me. And though it was written several years ago, it never loses it's power to remind me that each day is a new chance to become who I want to be.

Re-Raveling Me

I am undone.
I have been unraveling for some time.
But this morning
I felt the last stitch let go.
Leaving me holding one end
Of the string-that-is-me,
The other end trailing off behind.

The string is intact,
Only the design was flawed.

So, first thing tomorrow,
I will begin, again.
Remaking myself, a stitch at a time,
Recycling what lies behind me,
Into what lies before me,
Until I reach the opposite end,
Held gently in the hand of God