This week is hard.
A year ago tomorrow, my mom called to tell me my daddy was dying.
And I couldn’t get there–I couldn’t have made it in time (and I had just had a small, but emergency, out-patient surgery).
He was mostly asleep, thankfully, through those couple of days.
A year ago Friday, I called on a lunch break to see if I could catch him awake. There were things I wanted to say.
But he was asleep.
And then he was gone before I could call again.
I wanted to say, I’m so glad you stepped up to be daddy when I needed one, that you were there for me.
I wanted to say, when my PTSD therapist tells me to picture a safe place, I am a little girl again, sitting on your lap, eating the popcorn you would make me when the inevitable summer thunder storm would force me out of the pool. The smell of butter and salt and chlorine mingle in a comforting miasma.
I wanted to say, please don’t die disappointed in me. Because I got pregnant, because I moved to California, because I teach at a university, because I’m a liberal non-gun owner.
I wanted to say, you gave me the safe place to fall so I could make my own decisions, that it hurts so much that who I grew to be disappoints you, but that I will always always love you and that I hope you know I had to be who I am.
