One dad, four years, and a few silver linings

Tonight marks four years that our dad left us for a more perfect world.  I like to think that for him it is a world of Minnesota Twins, fresh corn on the cob, cabins, and bicycle rides. A world of gardens without weeds, autumns without winters, life without death.

And certainly a world without car repairs.

It is much easier for me to write about my dad's death than it was in the beginning.  I will always miss my dad, but time, if nothing else, has the gracious power of healing wounds.  Of taking away the sting.  Of showing us the beauty that was there, even in the midst of the suffering.

I couldn't see the silver linings then, not when it happened.  I could only focus on the sorrow, the injustice, the pain.  Now, four years later I look back on the days surrounding his death and funeral and can finally see some of that beauty.

Beauty:  My dad died the night of November 18.  His obituary and his death certificate say November 19 because that is when his body was found.  He went on a bike ride the evening of the 18th, like he frequently did.  My mom went to a young women's activity.  When she came home she noticed my dad wasn't home, but figured he had stopped to say hi to a neighbor, give a jug of apple juice, or do any of the countless things that would distract him from being home on a Wednesday night.  She fell asleep on the rocking chair waiting for him, and when she woke up at 11 with my dad still not home, the panic set in.  She called my brother who lived in Price and called a few neighbors.  They went out searching for him.  It was cold and it was dark.  They searched and searched and searched.  Besides my brother in Price, none of the other kids knew any of this was going on.  My dad's body was found in a little ditch in the early hours of the morning of the 19th.  His hands were still on the handlebars.  He had a gash in his forehead, but there was not bleeding which would indicate that his blood had stopped circulating and he had died before the bike ever hit the ground.  Cardiac arrest is the doctor's best explanation.  He most likely died at the very beginning of his bike ride as he was only quarter of a mile or so from our home, probably around 5 or 6 in the evening.  We know he didn't suffer through the cold night and that he was dead before anyone ever thought to wonder where he was.

That night I was playing poker.  A friend at BYU had invited me over for a Texas Hold Em tournament with just the guys.  It was me and five boys.  The buy in was $3.  I'm not terrible at poker, but I certainly don't ever play the game planning on making money.  That night I won.  Easily, too.  I got good hands, I bluffed like a pro, I fooled all those BYU frat boys.  Five dudes and me and I took their money and beat them to pieces at their own game.

My dad would sometimes tell us kids about his poker playing days.  He'd tell us with a sly, mischievous grin, how he'd sit in the back of the bus and clean out all of his buddies.  He was a good poker player in his day, one of the best, but shhhh don't tell mom.  Mom would smile, she knew the man she had married, but feigned disapproval.  Now that the pain has dulled I can think back to that night playing poker and feel my dad there with me.  Helping me win those silly hands, perhaps?  He had already passed on by the time I was enjoying a my poker night, and I like to think he lingered that night to watch, and maybe even help, his Bopper play a few hands.

Beauty #2:  I received the phone call around 7:30 am the morning of the 19th.  I was already at school, doing my student teaching.  When I heard the news I went in to tell my cooperating teacher that I would be going home, that I wouldn't be teaching that day- I had to leave right away.  My cooperating teacher had lost his own dad at a young age and I will never forget that look of complete understanding and empathy he gave me when I told him.  He knew the pain exactly, and he was so tender and sweet with me that morning and throughout the entirety of my student teaching.

Another one:  My home in Price was an hour and a half away from where I was going to school in Provo.  I didn't have to make that drive alone.  Two of my sisters and one brother lived in Provo.  We made the drive down together.  I sat in the backseat in the middle on the hump.  The only time in my life where that crowded, squishy spot was the most wanted seat in the car, and I got it.

Beauty #4:  I remember so vividly approaching the front door to our house and seeing the sign "Give Thanks" on the door.  It was a week before Thanksgiving, after all, and my mom had decorated the house with Thanksgiving gear.  I remember feeling like that sign was mocking my pain, telling me to give thanks for the single most difficult experience of my life.  Now I can look back tenderly at that sign.  Thanksgiving had always been my dad's favorite holiday, and he had long taught his children about the holiday.  I know all about how Lincoln first declared it a national holiday and how FDR later changed it from the last Thursday of the month to the fourth Thursday.  I know all the history of that day because my dad absolutely loved the idea of a day to surround yourself with people and food and just be grateful. The sign wasn't mocking me, it was a sweet reminder of everything that my dad encompassed.  A tender mercy, in fact.

Beauty #5:  The first person I saw when I entered the house was Chris Heiner, our neighbor down the street.  She was sweeping the front entrance.  She gave me a big hug and I don't remember if any words were spoken, but somehow I needed her to be there.  She had long been friends with our family, both of my parents loved and respected her immensely.  She was calm and collected, the perfect woman to be in my home.

Beauty #6:  Most of that day is a complete blur to me.  I remember my mom huddled up in the rocking chair with a blanket over her.  I remember so many people coming and going.  I remember endless amounts of food that nobody wanted to eat.  I remember a flower truck making constant deliveries.  One of my favorite things I remember, though is my my mom's best friend's son.  He had to be in his late 20s or 30s at the time.  He was a grown man presumably with a grown job and grown responsibilities.  I don't know that I had ever said two words to him in my whole life.  Yet he was there all day long.  Through the tearful morning, through the long afternoon hours.  He was always nearby, but never saying anything at all.  I remember sitting at the table and watching him play cards with my nephew.  For hours, just he and my nephew playing with a deck of cards.  What a weird thing to bring comfort to someone, I think, but it unmistakably helped me in those most difficult hours.  Life is busy, people had excuses to not be there, but not this man.  He was there all day long.  A beautiful silver lining on that day.

One last one:  There are eight kids in my family.  Six were living in Utah at the time.  My sister flew in the next day from Virginia.  My brother and his family, however, were living in India, and I remember how anxious I felt for him to get there, to make our family complete- or at least as complete as it could be now.  It wasn't until more than 48 hours later that he walked in the door with his pregnant wife and two boys, weary and travel ridden.  I remember how we all cried when we saw my brother, the new oldest male in our family.  I will never forget his lanky body walking through that front door and how my mom hugged him and the rest of the family crowded him, united in our pain.  With him there it finally felt like we had permission to mourn.

I have said that I can see my dad in the shadows in my life.  That I hear him in the quiet evenings when I'm writing, or when I see the red fall leaves in all their splendor.  I feel him when I'm at his cabin, early in the morning making french toast or late at night looking at the stars. Sometimes I hear his quiet laugh when I'm teaching. I can almost always hear him expressing appreciation for good food and good people when I'm seated at the table with my mom and siblings.

What I didn't realize until recently was that my dad didn't wait to come to me, to be a part of my life after his death.  I had thought I needed to wait to have him close to me again, that I couldn't feel his presence with me until months after his passing, but that wasn't true at all.  He was in the shadows of my life immediately after he died- instantaneously, in fact.  He was there that actual night helping me play poker, that next morning through a sign on our door and a neighbor sweeping our floor, two days later when my last family member made it home safely to be with us and we embraced in the hallway.  As soon as my dad left this earth he was with me.

I guess the most beautiful beauty of them all, then, is that he never left at all.

Hurt less, love more

^^My dad with his grandchild, Emily.

^^ One of my favorite pictures ever- my dad and three of my brothers looking on.

November will mark four years since my dad's death.  Each year, around the end of October, I take a deep breath, clench my fists and do my best to charge through November- as if my own determindedness and impious stubbornness could make the month speed by faster and therefore not allow me any time to feel the pain associated with the anniversary of my dad's death.

It never works.  But I still try nonetheless.

The weird thing about losing someone is that it really never stops hurting.

It stops bleeding profusely, yes. It stops throbbing, perhaps.  But it doesn't stop hurting.  It doesn't hurt every second of every day.  No, not at all.  Some days go by virtually pain free.  Days are busy and full and you don't remember that you lost your dad or that if he were still alive he would have called you to see how your new job is going or that this is his favorite time of year. Some days you don't think about it.

And so a day will go by without hurting.  A week.  Two weeks, even.  But the hurt is still there, hidden in the recesses of my heart and cruelly, it sits, always ready to pounce.  And then one day it returns- the unannounced and unwanted remembrance that gosh, I miss my dad.

A sudden longing for my dad came unannounced a few days ago.  It was triggered by a dream I had had about him.  (FYI... in Spanish they change the preposition that goes along with dream.  Instead of dreaming "of" or "about" someone you dream "with" them.  In my head now I always think of dreaming this way.  Such a prettier way to put it... I dreamed with my dad.  As if I weren't alone in my dreaming... as if he were dreaming too, actively involved in the dreaming, doing something with me.)

In the dream my dad was here with my family.  I don't know if he was back from the dead or if he had never died or what he was doing living on this earth, quite frankly.  He was just here. He gave of each of his eight children a letter that contained his last words to us.  Everything important that he wanted us to know was in that letter.  They were individualized and full of inside jokes and tender sentiments and all the reasons he loved us.  In his letter he called me his favorite nickname, "Bopper" and "child I love so much."

When I woke up I felt almost paralyzed with grief and anger.  I was mad that I didn't have a letter, a goodbye, a "I'm leaving you now."  What in the world is fair about not saying goodbye to your dad?  I sat up in bed, took a deep breath and wondered while I choked back the tears, "Gosh. Will this ever stop hurting?"

I don't know the answer to that question, but after 1400+ dad-less days I suspect that the answer is no, it doesn't ever stop hurting.  The hardest part, I decided, about losing my dad at 23 is knowing that my children will live their entire mortal life without knowing him.  It is this thought, more than any other, that lingers so painfully.  I am wildly jealous of my four oldest siblings who had children before my dad died.  Why couldn't I have been older too?  Why couldn't I have just one child who will have memories of his "baba"?  I try to chase the thought out of my mind, instead imagining my dad and my unborn children hanging out together now, even as I write this.  If nothing else, it helps calm my troubled heart.

And so I try to focus on the positive and remember happy memories and thank God for the time I did have and not be a total drag on Greg or my family by holding onto pain that needs to be released.  But the fact is I like remembering my dad and I like missing him, however painful it may be.  It makes me feel close to him. At this point I suppose it's hard to tell if the pain won't let go of me or if I won't let go of the pain.

These posts I write about my dad are always the toughest ones for me to write.  I know they are tough for my family, especially my mom, to read.  But I write them for a few reasons.  One is purely selfish- it helps me to understand and sort through my feelings of sorrow and mourning.  It helps me through the grieving process. Sheesh- the grieving process- who would have thought it would last for four years? (Will it extend four more? And four more after that?  Does the grieving process ever end?)

The second reason I write these posts is because I have received a handful of emails from readers who have lost someone close to them and who thank me for posting what I do about my dad.  They relate and they thank me for writing something that conveys what they are feeling.  I have heard losing a family member compared to joining an exclusive "club" of people who have lost loved ones.  Given, it's a terrible club that no one wants to be in. Most people don't even know it exists until they are in it and then they immediately want out.  Once you are in, though, the other "I have lost someone I loved very very much" club members are some of the sweetest, most sensitive and caring people out there.  They listen to your grief.  They cry with you.  They never tell you they are running short on time.  They share their own grief in hopes that you will feel you're not alone.  It's the worst club you could ever recruited into comprised of the best club members imaginable.  How's that for paradox?

So I suppose the second reason I write is for those guys.  My fellow club members and future club members...  with a hope that somehow we all heal together and hurt less and love more and miss less.

Hoping that we let go of the pain.

For my dad

"Fathers, yours is an eternal calling from which you are never released... a father’s calling is eternal, and its importance transcends time. It is a calling for both time and eternity." -Ezra Taft Benson

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY, DAD! (Sunday)

and

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! (Monday)

I miss you all the time. 

Love,
Bopper

Home... let me go home...

My home for 20 years.

I haven't been to my hometown of Price, Utah for almost a year.  My mom sold our house in Price and moved up to Provo less than a year after my dad's death.  When I visited home in the year after he died, it took me the entire 90 minute drive from Provo to Price to prepare myself mentally to be in my house, to be there without dad, to be "home" but not feel like it was still "home".

After my mom moved, it wasn't something I had to deal with anymore, and in a way I have mentally blocked out Price.  It's been two and a half years since my dad passed away, and while I don't totally understand the grieving process, I do understand that I am in some ways still going through it. 

This was evidenced this weekend when Hubs and I decided to take a camping trip down to Moab.  Going to Moab requires going through Price.  It wasn't until we were on the road that I started getting scared.  I realized I would have to go through Price, and that it could be difficult. 

And it was. 

Every street, every store, every landmark reminded me of my dad, of my family before he died, of my childhood, of what once was.  Passing through Price I described to Hubs, "that's the car wash where I hosed down my friends on the last day of school", "that's my elementary school", "that's my dad's old office building."  We even stopped at KFC for lunch and I remembered my 17th birthday, eating there with my parents and my little sister and how now it's just a joint that we stop at on our way home from camping.

Isn't it weird to revisit a place that held so much significance in your life?  To return to a place that was your home but that isn't any longer?  I felt the same way when I went back to visit Argentina two years after my mission.  To be on the same dirt roads, to go to the same little shops, to return to an earlier stage of life.  It makes me think of the place I am in now, and wonder if one day it will be weird for me to return, maybe with my kids in tow, to this apartment complex or to Copper Hills High and say "That's where your dad and I lived when we were first married" or "that's where I had my first real job."  It is crazy for me to think not only of the significance that people have in my life, but of places too.

On our way home from our camping extravaganza, I wanted to drive past my old house.  But I just couldn't bring myself to.  So we drove on through, on toward Provo, and I promised myself that next time I'll stop by the house.  I guess that I gain strength and work through my grief one step at a time.

And the next step?  Getting my damn feet taken care of.  These burning toes have got to go!

Blessings



On Wednesday, an old high school classmate lost her father in a plane crash.

I haven't spoken to this classmate in years, and have only known anything about her life from occasional status updates on facebook.  I never met her dad, and I never had a close relationship with her. 

But I felt crushed by the news all the same.

Ever since my own dad's death, I find myself so much more affected by loss.  (Don't tell anyone, but I sometimes cry when reading the newspaper.  Embarrassing, I know!)   

I sat down at the computer to send my classmate a little facebook message- to tell her I understood sudden and unexpected death.  To tell her I was sorry.  To tell her that she'd be okay.  That she should look for the blessings that come from this. 

Somehow I couldn't say any of that.  Because I remember all of those things being said to me, and I remember none of it helped.  I was sad, and I felt cheated and neglected, and nothing that anyone else said would help these feelings go away.  Looking back now on the tragedy of my dad's death, it doesn't seem so much a "tragedy", but rather an opportunity for growth and learning.  I thought of telling this girl of all the blessings I have seen since my dad's death.  I thought of telling her of the closer relationship with my mom, as we have had to cling to each other in my dad's absence.  Or of my greater understanding of the purpose and the power of prayer.  Or of my hope for the resurrection.  I thought of mentioning to her that I have greater compassion and sympathy for others who struggle and are in pain, and that that has served me in all aspects of my life. 

I even considered mentioning to her that I have a greater appreciation for men and the roles they play in our lives.  Interestingly enough, I don't know if I would have married Hubs without the sorrow, the vulnerability, the emptiness that my dad's death left with me.  I think I would have kept playing around, acting irresponsibly, dating losers, and trying to never grow up.  But when my dad left, my whole perspective changed.  I wanted stability, I wanted love, I wanted strength-  not fun, adventure, and freedom. 

But, of course, I couldn't say any of that to my classmate.  She is hurting too much to understand these blessings that will come. 

But they will come.

Exciting News!

Listen up, peeps! I've got something exciting to say, so you better pay attention! 

Starting right this very second, I am going to be writing weekly articles for weightlosswars.com.  Pretty legit, right?!?  The concept of the site is brilliant- people compete with others to see who can lose the most amount of weight.  According to the creators, "Weightlosswars pits its members against each other in fun, exciting, encouraging, supporting, and down right dirty weight loss competitions. "  It's like The Biggest Loser for everybody and anybody. 

Toldya it was genius.

I know what you're thinking.  What in the world makes me think I qualified to write weight loss articles?  Um.... because I like to write?  Really, I have no idea.  Someone asked me to and I said yes.  That's good enough, right? 

My first article was today.  So go ahead and read it and let me know what you think... AKA say really nice things about it.

And now, without furthur ado, I present to you, Bonbon, the weightloss writer!

When I was twenty years old, my then-boyfriend, Shane, asked me “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever gone through ?”

Shane was a recovering drug addict and was going through one of the most difficult stages in his life. I wanted so badly to relate to him. To show him that I understood what he was going through. To show him that I could be strong, just like him.

I racked my brain. Nothing was coming.

(Read the rest of the story here.)