Month: February 2024

Missing my Best Friend

When I started this blog, I forewarned everyone on the intro page that there would be both good, bad, and sometimes ugly on here. Well, here is one of those instances. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t a light hearted post. Today marks a day that still takes my breath away and brings tears to my eyes. Nineteen years ago today, I lost my very best friend. A man that raised me to believe that even though I was a girl, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, and that if I wanted something, I would have to work hard for it. While it feels like 19 years has flown by, it also feels like yesterday that his life was suddenly over and I was left without a father. While I do my best to suppress most of the memories from that day, there are pieces, I will never forget no matter how hard I try. As far as I can remember, it started out as a normal day. Noah was only 10 months old, and I was a stay at home mom. Joe was home from his deployment and was back to work. It was a Saturday, we had been doing some stuff around the house and dad had been in Pinckneyville at the Thresherman’s Association Day. It was all about the tractors. He had come home and Joe and I decided to go ahead and do our grocery shopping. We had almost decided to leave Noah at home with Grandpa, but ended up deciding to get something to eat while we were out and take him with us. As my dad entered the house, we were leaving and he looked at Noah and said the very last words I would ever hear him say. Noah had put his pudgy little arms around his neck to give him a hug and my dad told him he loved it when he did that. After getting the groceries we headed home. Dad had been at the house and had parked in the driveway. We decided to call him to let him know we were almost home so he could move his truck. He didn’t answer his phone and we figured he probably was crashed out on the couch. We tried to call again with no answer. When we pulled up to the house, Joe opened the garage door and ran in the house to grab the keys. I started to get Noah out of his carseat and head inside when Joe ran back out the door, looked at me with a panicked look on his face and told me to go to my moms. I knew something was wrong and I took off running with Noah in my arms up the stairs and what I was met with will never leave my mind. My dad was laying motionless, gray in color on my kitchen floor. He had just poured a glass of his favorite blue kool-aide, the ice still in the trays. The moment I saw him, I knew what had happened. He had a massive heart attack and according to the paramedics, he was gone before he hit the floor. Everything after that is mostly a blur. I somewhat remember running to the neighbors house for help. They took Noah from me and the neighbors fiancé and Joe tried to revive my dad. It was too late, but Joe didn’t want to give up. I will spare the rest of the details of waiting on the coroner and watching the funeral home take my dad from my house. The next day I joined my mom and husband at the funeral home and did one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, which was pick out his casket. The whole thing never really felt real. The day we buried him, and I saw the name engraved on the vault, it hit me. I never truly grieved the loss of my father. I was too busy keeping it together for everyone else and knew that Noah wouldn’t understand. I think about him often and wonder what he would be doing at this age. I’m sure spending time in the barn teaching Noah everything he knew about tractors, cars, and everything in between. He was only 53 when he died, which for me was too young. He had so much life left to live, and so many things left to experience. Losing my father at 27 changed the person I am today. I no longer feel like I can do anything I set my mind to as a lot of that came from the support and encouragement he gave me daily. When you lose a best friend, a piece of you goes with them and you never really get it back. Over the last 19 years, I have learned that life isn’t fair. It doesn’t always go the way you think it is going to and loving someone isn’t enough to keep them from dying. I have dreams about my dad, some where I get to talk to him and it is like he never left. Other times the nightmares happen and it is always the same dream. I am fighting to keep him here with me and no matter how I try, the result is always the same. I wake up on an emotional roller coaster and a tear stained face. I miss him. I miss his smile, his laugh, and his infectious personality that made him who he was.

Driving Home

I was driving home yesterday from a birthday party which took me about a solid hour. I had just about made it home when I realized that I had driven 55 minutes in complete silence. I never turned the radio on, my phone had not rung, and I had not received one message or notification. It came to me that I had been thinking all the way home. Not about anything in particular, but just a little of this and that. It was that perfect time of day of when the sun was setting, and the sky looked like a watercolor painting. It was warm in the car, so I had the window partly down and the breeze was cool, but still had bit of warmth left to it from the setting sun. One of the things that had crossed my mind was my grandmother. She just recently turned 97 years old. This last week, her furnace stopped working and we had to have someone come out to look at it for her. She doesn’t quite understand that the amount of money it takes this day and age to fix something when it breaks. Instead of having her be upset about the money, we just told her that it would be fixed, and the cost would be minimal. That situation made me get to thinking about why she would be upset, and it didn’t take me long to realize. She was born in the 20’s, a time where the country was in a financial crisis, money wasn’t easy to come by and most families had multiple children in order to have help on family farms as soon as the kids were old enough to work. She has never had much, always been poverty level on some degree. She was raised with the mindset to never waste anything, and unless it could not be fixed, you didn’t buy new. Most of the time you went without anyways because you couldn’t afford it. Kids these days laugh at the old stories of a one room schoolhouse and memes of walking a mile to school barefoot, when in reality that is exactly what she had to do. Although, she did it with the younger siblings at her feet and would be the first to school to start an old coal stove for heat. I can’t think of a time in her life that has been easy going or without some sort of heart ache. She is now the only surviving child out of 11 kids. Most of her family has passed before her, and even those friends that she has known, have passed. She is a woman of great strength. She lives by the means of a small check given to her once a month. She saves her money in envelopes to pay bills and has a hard time understanding why she can’t pay those bills locally in person. She has lived through 16 different presidents, and 6 major wars. She has never had cable, a vcr, a cd player, or a computer. She still uses a rotary phone and listens to Elvis on an old record player. Her favorite book is the bible, and she has read it more times that most people. When I think about her, I don’t see a feeble old woman. I see a woman that has conquered more in her lifetime than most will in half of theirs. I see a woman to took care of everyone else long before she took care of herself. I see a woman who takes everything thrown her way, and deals with it. I don’t know that I can ever be even a portion of who she was. I say was because with every passing year, her mine isn’t as quite as sharp as it used to be and things that she would have normally power housed right through, take a little bit longer. She also comes from a time when things were broken, you tried to fix it. You didn’t take it and just throw it away. That is a problem I see far too often in people. Whether it be a relationship, a broken handle on an axe, or even their own children, they are too quick to throw it away instead of taking the time or energy to try and fix it. A lot of us would do well to take a look back and listen to a few of the stories from those that came long before us and learn a little something.