| Hello xanga friends. Thank you for your concern, and for praying for me and my family. I have learned a lot about grief over the past few weeks, more than I thought existed on the subject. I feel an overwhelming compulsion to explain my dad from top to bottom so that when you hear "my dad just died" it doesn't sound so...common. Dads die every day, right? But I want you to know that he was my dad, and he was wonderful and he will always be the backbone of our family. I want you to know that he grew up fishing the Clinch River and was a basketball star in high school, and had a 33-year career applying for grants to provide running water to people in backwoods Appalachian towns. I wish you knew how his face changed after a day on the lake, that he bought my mom incredible Christmas gifts, and that he liked milk with his pizza. But I can just assume that you all know what it's like to have love come out of your heart for another person in a way that is best described as effortless. So, here I am on this side of saying goodbye in a surreal but promising way. You're gone for now, but I'll see you soon. I've had a luxury that I'm sure a lot of people don't have when dealing with a death, and that is being able to be home and sit and talk and revisit details and heal. We've talked about dad and laughed about him and our memory pool is bottomless. Soon after the accident I wrote a letter to a friend and got a lot of emoting and storytelling off my chest and I thought I'd go ahead and post a chunk of it here on my xanga so that you can know the whole story, and understand again along with me how bad things can (and will) happen, but the world will keep turning and Daylight Savings Time will continue to screw up our sleep and it won't mean God has fallen off the throne. Why does it take the dark, scary, awful things to teach me the most? And how does it work that something awful (death) can yield something fruitful? I see the whole world differently. I thought I would feel sorry for myself and envy everyone else going about their daily routine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, I’m sad for mom who doesn’t have dad in her golden years, and I’m sorry my kids will never sit on his lap. But I suddenly have crystal clear perception of those who have fathers and husbands and sons but take them for granted, hold them at arm’s length. I’m left reeling in the goodness that my dad built into our family story, starting way back when he took us daughters to do grungy boy things on the riverbank. I pity those who didn’t have him for their dad or husband or friend or fishing buddy. I have no regrets and lots of gratefulness for the life I had with him at the helm. I guess I also feared that trauma would make me as jumpy as a cat, but nope. I hold life a lot looser now. I can’t control death any more than I can life, and rather than left questioning why this awful thing happened, I’m amazed that I’ve been spared so much. It is just unreal all that has happened. This is the story. It was Thursday, February 14th – Valentine’s Day. And it started as a great day. I had given dad a bunch of stuff to read that I’d printed off the internet about glyconutrients, because it is helping people with MS. He’d spent the day calling people all over the US and was so amped that he called my sister to tell her how hopeful he was to do something new, and if that didn’t work, he was going to keep researching stem cell injections in Toronto and China. He never gave up looking for a way to get better. But then he would say God had more things to worry about than his legs. We all kept praying for him. But I guess he prayed more or harder or better or whatever, because his one prayer was “God, please let me die before I’m ever in a wheelchair.” Boy, I used to think that was a selfish prayer. Mom, Dustan and I got home Thursday night around 9:30pm. We were all standing in the kitchen wondering where dad was because it was unlike him to be gone so late. Mom remembered that when she left the house just a little before 7, dad told her he was going to drive down to “smell the river.” She said to him, “You’ll always be my valentine” and he replied “I love you more now than I ever have.” We believe the accident happened right after mom left the house, that dad was dead instantly, and that he laid there until we came home and Dustan found him. The MS was really starting to take a toll on dad’s body. He struggled to walk even with a cane because of bad balance and “heavy legs.” He had poor foot control in a vehicle – worse even than I knew. He used his hand to pick his leg up sometimes and told Dustan often “Don’t stand behind me when I’m backing up because I don’t have any soft touch” (we laugh now at the understatement), so it was no surprise to us when we were able to see the accident site in daylight and put together the pieces of what must’ve happened. Because dad was the last one to leave the house that evening, there were no cars behind him and he could be less cautious than usual when backing up. We could see the grooves in the pavement where the wheels spun on the asphalt when he hit the accelerator too hard. The result was that the truck was thrown back. It busted through the fence at the bottom of our yard before he could get his foot to the brake, and after that was airborne. You can see every tire track in the side of the hill and broken pile of glass where the truck hit, and if you could just see the grade of the hillside – it is a total drop off. Dad was dumped out of the truck and then the truck kept on tumbling down the hill. Standing on our driveway, the bottom of the hill where his truck ended up is like looking into a valley and spotting a distant piece of wadded up metal. It is a long way down. Dustan discovered the accident while Mom and I were wondering where dad could be inside. He had gone out to unload something from our car when he heard the dogs barking and looked to see that a big chunk of the fence was down. (Now at night when I see it, it is like a black gaping hole and I wonder how we didn’t notice it immediately). We also kept our old aluminum river canoe laying there by the fence and Dust could see that it had been hit and was turned sideways. He ran to the edge and could see down to the valley and hear the ding dong from the truck, guessing the door was ajar or the dome light was on, never minding that the whole truck was crushed and the taillights were hanging out. It was way too far away to see that. He says that in that moment he put everything together. Knew my dad had crashed through the fence and that it was his truck dinging way down in the valley. He scrambled back inside, screaming for us to call 911. I think that was the worst moment of my life. I just remember he busted through the back door so hard that he shattered Trail’s porcelain water bowl. Then just like that he was gone, over the hill, calling for dad. I have retraced those details in my mind countless times, convincing myself that he wasn’t cold, he didn’t suffer, he didn’t know what hit him. Many of our friends that are paramedics assure me of this but still I wake Dustan up asking if he is sure there was plenty of internal bleeding. He tells me again and again what he looked like and how blood trickled out of one ear and, oddly enough, that brings me much comfort. In the rush of panic when Dustan first discovered the broken fence and while my mom was calling 911, I grabbed my dad’s deer spotlight and started over the hill. I was wearing a sweater and I immediately got hung up in the briars. It was so cold, I was so panicked. I just stopped and craned down the hill with the spotlight. That light was so bright I saw everything. Too much. I could see his black truck waaaaay down the hill shiny and crumpled. Thirty feet up from the truck I could see Dustan moving and then I slowly understood that I was also seeing my dad laying face down on the ground. That image stuck in my mind for hours, but now the trauma of it is wearing off, and I cling to any new details Dustan can give me. I wish now that I had gone down and seen him but mom says I was right to stay with her, and that I would not want that image in my mind. Last night mom found an old video. Just one. We have watched it over and over. It’s from 1994. We see now just how beautiful he was then and how much weight dad had lost recently, and how much dexterity and balance and strength. I have never thought so much about heaven as I do now. And how I used to detest those “God is good” clichés but ironically they have never seemed more true. This is the system we live in: people get sick and die. I am only grateful that mom and dad had a magical marriage, that dad loved us practically and wonderfully, that my life and childhood is full to the brim with the stories of trips to the river on hot summer afternoons and sickeningly Walton-ish Christmases. It is the grace of God that Dustan and I have been living here for two months, that mom was not alone through this whole ordeal, and that none of us witnessed the accident. I even find the silver lining in the fact that dad had slowly declined to the point of forcing mom to care for this home and land by herself. She is going to be ok. We have a thousand stories to tell. They’ll keep going forever. We also have a lot of living left to do, and we will say “wouldn’t Dad have loved this?” and “wouldn’t Jeff be so proud?” and “Boy, Dad would have liked this day” – over and over, and we will wear those phrases out. I know I won't have the energy to type these details again. I wanted to tell it though because somehow it is very therapeutic for me to tell this story. I know dad would get a big kick out of telling it. If you knew him, you’d know that he would tell it a few times trying to get the words exactly right. And when they fit and he got the story down, he’d tell it again and again the exact same way. He would love to know (and maybe he does) that a few days after the accident, our family took his loathed cane and threw it off the bridge of the river he fished so much in his youth, and was on his way to smell on the night of his death. We are still going to hike the Appalachian Trail, starting Monday, March 24th. It's nice knowing dad was so amped about this plan. In fact, this is my last post before the hike. From now on you can visit me at my other home on the internet at http://walkingtomaine.blogspot.com. Much virtual love,
Betsy |
