When my mom died I couldn't cry.
She had had cancer before and had beaten it. You brace yourself. You wait.
But, she recovered and life went on. You relax again.
Three times.
The last time it go her and all those long moments of bracing yourself seem to slam something shut that won't open again.
What really hurt the most was the death of a childhood wish that would now never ---ever--come true.
You see, all I had wanted when I was a kid was to have a mother and a father in the same room at the same time!
Yes. Simple as that.
But, my dad had divorced my mom when I was not quite a year old.
I had not a single memory of them together!
When I turned 25 I woke up one day with the startling urge to find my father and SEE HIM with my own eyes.
If I could, the ridiculous notion crossed my mind: I can get them into the same space at the same time and ME WITH THEM!
This was my dream. Naive and pointless, really.
Yet, I acted on it.
I found him!
He was living in Detroit, Michigan. I had been born there and my mom hated living in that city. She flew back to Fort Worth. It was her home town.
My dad quit his job at General Motors and took a pathetic job in Texas making almost nothing.
They lasted half a year and it was over!
I grew up fatherless and troubled. I was shy and had an awful inferiority complex.
Other boys had a dad who taught them sports. I knew none of that.
I was just a Nerd. Smart and sort of soft around the edges you might say.
The dream was always the same: My Mom and My Dad standing in the same room with me!
That would be the miracle. It would CURE EVERYTHING like a magic bullet.
But, my Dad, as I found him in Detroit, was living with his second wife and family. I had a half brother and half sister. They all had their own world.
None of them even knew I had existed! I may as well have been a meteor that one day tore a hole in their roof to let in the rain!
After a week of strained hospitality I found my way back to Texas.
My mother was furious with me when I told her!!
Who can explain such things? I couldn't.
So, the years put more and more distance between all of us until that day my mother died and even the craziest idea had to be buried too!
The hole in my soul remained.
Then, a letter came one day.
It was a sudden sort of intrusion with me not having any contact with him since that week in 1972.
The return address was the same house I had once lived in as an infant in my mother's arms and the place where I had stood looking at my
father's face as a 25 year old young man.
You won't understand me when I tell you I did NOT OPEN this letter. No.
I did not want to read what he had to say.
Call it spite. Call it fear. Call it anything you want to say. I simply wanted the POWER to refuse to allow it into my head.
My guess was that now--at some point in my Dad's life--he was old and sick and maybe was about to die and now he NEEDED to say something to me.
He was reaching out to me. OUT OF HIS NEED and not mine.
Well, no thank you.
It sounds very immature and even evil when I write these words. But, I still understand why I didn't open his letter.
A couple of years later my Aunt Shirley (my dad's sister) wrote to say he had died.
I didn't feel anything at first.
Then, what I felt was that renewed sense of loss that reminded me of my dream. I would NEVER have my mom and dad and myself in the same room at the same time.
That silly and annoying thought!!
A few hours ago I was trying to make room in my closet. Time to throw things away. Sort through this and that.
What would I use and what would I toss in the trash?
The letter fell out of an old book.
My dad's last letter (and his first--now that I think about it) to me.
The UNopened letter.
The letter I had refused to read.
I impulsively tore it open.
It wasn't a letter. It was a small photo wrapped in notebook paper.
The photo had my father standing rather proudly next to my young 22 year old mother who was about 9 months pregnant with child: me!
A photo of a dream.
An impossible dream.
I hardly know what to say about the feelings.
I started crying almost hysterically.......but....with a happiness I've never known before.
I just wanted to tell you about it before the moment had passed.
I now have it framed on my bedroom wall.
I keep staring at it. With...so much.....JOY!