Daddy

1935–2023

Happy New Year, dear readers.

I spent the holiday eve lying on a bed on the floor in my parents’ house with my little dog batting my hand away from the phone I was trying to type on, trying to record coherent thoughts because we have a publishing schedule and I am nothing if not a rule follower. I learned it from my daddy.

My head is in a whirl since we lost my daddy Saturday morning, but the whirl is kind of grayed out—not in vivid color, lacking the appropriate emotion. This is what happens when tragedy strikes: my brain puts itself on autopilot taking care of things—and people—that need tending to. It will come back online later when there is nothing else to do and I will fall apart when it’s more convenient.

I used to think this was an enneagram 9 thing, but I’ve learned it is also a trauma response. According to @augustknoxcoaching on Instagram,

“Trauma Survivors are great in stressful & traumatic situations because their body & minds are so prepped for ‘responding’ that they can live in a perpetual state of ‘go.’”

I am feeling this very deeply right now. After spending two days taking care of Mom and shedding almost no tears at all, I drove home to the farm today and I can feel grief rolling over me. It’s like having a stomach virus: you feel the nausea build up, it gets released, and you feel better for a little while until the next wave comes. Is it irreverent to compare grief with throwing up?

I am the queen of holding it together for everyone else, and I was successful last weekend until my brother handed me a small box of my father’s bathroom things: toothbrushes, floss, shaving cream, nail clippers. On the top sat his glasses and I came undone. I only ever knew my daddy with glasses, and there they were, in the box of things he would no longer need.

I took the box to the house and left it in his bathroom, I’m not sure why. As I set it down, I picked up the glasses again and looked at them. During a recent hospital stay I had cleaned them for him, but they were already full of smudges. These last five months, Daddy never took them off except for an MRI. He even slept with them on.

Here they were, in my hands instead of on his face. I thought about keeping them but decided that would be a little too weird, so they are still in the box in his bathroom. At some point someone will throw them away or donate them, but I don’t want to be the one to do it. That’s way too final.

I am the only girl in my family. My parents already had two boys before me (and one after), and then I came along. I get the feeling my father didn’t know what to do with a little girl, so he was pretty hands-off, as if he thought he might break me.

I knew he loved me because he provided well, but neither of us really knew how to relate to the other. I don’t remember sitting on his lap or holding his hand or anything like that. He was not comfortable with emotions; I am highly sensitive. He was not physically affectionate when I was a child. Mom was always the one to read me a story and tuck me in bed at night. Yet when I suffered a broken engagement at 20, Daddy was the first one to comfort me.

I knew he loved me because he made my brothers catch grasshoppers for me to bait my hook with. He even made them put the wiggling insects on the hook for me. But he had enough tough love in him to make me clean my own fish, a skill that has actually come in handy in adulthood.

I knew he loved me because, instead of going back to school to earn his master’s degree and advance his career, he piled us kids and my mom in the car and hauled us and our little trailer all over the country three summers in a row, showing us all the natural wonders that make America. He might have made us stop and look at sedimentary rock layers on the sides of mountain passes, but we understood he just could not stop being a teacher. That’s who he was at his core.

I knew he loved me when he was my teacher for high school chemistry and physics and he insisted I did not call him Mr. Irre, but Daddy. Every time I said it in class, the other students would go, “Awww!” And I knew he loved me because he didn’t get the slightest bit mad when I borrowed his car to go to Burger King for lunch and left the lights on so the battery drained and my friend Cheryl and I had to walk back to school. We came into physics class late and I laid the keys on his desk, telling him his car was across town. He loved me.

I knew he loved me because he helped me buy my first car and then followed me home to make sure I could handle the clutch. I remember looking in my rearview mirror and seeing him laughing as I bucked through an intersection and somehow that was the beginning of a bond between us. I never could get the hang of that car, so when I went back to college in the fall, he sent me in his nice car and he kept the one I couldn’t drive.

I knew he loved me because he taught me how to open a checking account and how to balance the checkbook every month. He taught me how to make a budget so I wouldn’t run out of money halfway through the year.

I knew he loved me because he put me through college with no debt and I came out of it with a new car. He was a financial genius for all of us and that was the way he spoke love.

I knew he loved me when he came to Dad-Daughter weekend at my college every year and played softball and volleyball even though he was not the least bit sportsy. But he loved to dance and taught me how to follow his lead when Benny Goodman came on. He brought me flowers to wear to the dance.

I knew he loved me the time he and Mom came to visit when Ben was enlisted in the Navy and we had five children and no money and our stove was down to two working burners and an oven that sometimes functioned and he said he was buying us a new one. He told me he had a magic bank account, where money magically appeared every month. I knew that wasn’t true, but it felt like he was the one telling the bedtime fairy tale after all those years and I felt so loved.

I knew he loved me when he figured out why our well water made the pasta slimy. The pH was too high—it just needed a splash of vinegar—and he said with a smile, “See? Better living through chemistry!”

I knew he loved me when he sent checks, semester after semester for a lot of years, to help us get all those children (and my husband) through college. I knew he loved me when he offered to pay the closing costs on our first home. I knew he loved me when he showed up for visits ready to help teach the children some new science concept with what we fondly referred to as the “torture box,” and when he tutored the one who struggled with college physics.

I knew he loved me when he sent great books for us and the kids to read. When he gave the children one of his canned speeches. When he helped support one of the kids when she was wrongfully fired from her job two months after she bought her first home. He loved us well.

My father was not a man who showed emotion. But I knew. I always knew.

There was so much love in there and it came out in the only ways he could show it.

As long as I can remember, my daddy has said I was perfect. He said it all of my 62 years. He once told Ben I was perfect and when Ben chuckled, Daddy leaned forward and said, “I’m serious.”

I am smart enough to know how perfect I am not, but that’s how much my daddy loved me.

I miss him already.