Picture this: Your dad was someone who poured love into you, always made sure you knew that he loved you, wholeheartedly. Asked you if you needed tampons every time he went grocery shopping, when you were a teen. Showed up at your house at 4:30am with a fresh pot of homemade, super garlicky chicken soup when you tell him you’re sick, even though the drive was 7.5-8 hours and he forgot your door code, as an adult. He was always there for the big moments, for the hard moments, for the WTF do I do moments.
Now, picture this: It’s Easter weekend in 2021, you had invited your dad out because your 3.5 year old wanted to celebrate his birthday with him. Saturday comes and you haven’t heard from him, no response to calls or texts, a sinking feeling washes over you. You don’t quite know what that means yet. Sunday hits, still no answer. That’s when it pops into your head that you need to call for a wellness check, but you don’t. You ask your brother if he’s seen your dad.
Sunday night, the phone rings, a distraught brother on the other end. “He’s gone.” You collapse, pick yourself up and make your way outside to tell your husband, where you both collapse, crying in pain. You start making the calls to your dad’s siblings to tell them the news, and call your friends for support, while your husband makes arrangements for people to come stay with your kids so you can get on the road to head to BC, to your hometown, where your heart is going to shatter.
You drive all night, through the mountain passes, to make the first ferry to your hometown. When you arrive, there’s an eerie stillness, a stabbing pain, and yet, a sense of peace.
A sense of relief because you know that your dad is no longer suffering, that his pain is gone, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less for you. You take to smashing stuff in the field, breaking fences, and laying on the ground screaming and sobbing, as you repeatedly call his phone just to hear his voice.
This year is the halfway mark. This is the year where he has been gone, as long as he was present and alive, for our girls. When they celebrate their birthday’s this year, they will have lived longer without him than they did with him. That one truly hurts, and creates this big achy heart feeling.
We talk about my dad, almost daily, in our home. Keeping the memories we have of him alive, sharing what he was like when I was a kid, with our girls. Sharing the memories I have of him on the property we live on, of the things we did as a kid, the places we saw, and the memories I have from my childhood, recreating some of them with our own girls because they were so special.
Redhaven Homestead 