When I was a little girl, probably about 3, I called my father "honey." I had heard my mother call him that, and I supposed that was his name. That has been a source of amusement in our family ever since. I was definitely a daddy's girl. He called me "sweetums," even in front of my friends when I was in high school. How embarrassing, right? When I was a child, he would take me out in the backyard with a pair of binoculars to do some star gazing. He explained the constellations, we talked about God and life on other planets. We looked for Venus and Mars on clear nights as well. Tradition had it that Dad and I shopped for the Christmas tree. He would drive to the Christmas Tree lot in downtown Laurel where, hand in hand, we inspected each tree until we found just the right one. Even though it was the south, we drank hot chocolate because it was December. He told me that when I started dating that he would sit in the back seat with a shotgun to make sure that no funny business occurred. I believed him. He played the guitar, and his favorite song was "Red River Valley." It became our favorite, too. He could make the scariest faces, pulling his face into all kinds of contortions. And then he would put a flashlight under his chin, making his face even scarier. When I was in graduate school, he drove me, one of my friends, and my mom to the University of Texas so that we could do research in the humanities library--it was the biggest one of its kind and had original papers by E. M. Forster. When my dad found out that I needed the materials in that library, he insisted. When I was finishing my dissertation one Christmas, I needed to go back to school early, and again, he drove me all the way to Knoxville and back home without a break because he had to go to work the next day. He was my hero. By 1991, I had gotten married and moved across the country to Washington state. I was really, really homesick, for the South, but most particularly for family and for the nearness of my dad. Tragedy seemed to come all at once to our family. My brother, Randy, died in 2000 of a brain hemmorage. My mother died in 2002 of a brain tumor. And Dad was there through it all, steady and strong. He grieved deeply for my brother, but was bereft when my mother died. However, in these later years, he had developed dementia and in some ways, he changed. After awhile I think he just could not think clearly any longer, and it made him angry with himself. He had always been a strong, independent man and had worked hard his entire life; he loved his family deeply and it was hard for him when we all went away. He lived alone until Hurricane Katrina came along and virtually wiped out our town--without power and all alone, his confusion just added to the threat to his safety. Greg, the younger of my three brothers, and his wife drove down from Atlanta and took him back with them. He would never return to Laurel. Greg had him checked out in the hospital and the doctors determined it was no longer safe for him to live alone. At that time, he was admitted into a care unit for patients with alzheimer's or dementia, and my brother saw him almost every day for five years. He died on August 30, 2010, at around 9:00 in the evening. I got there just in time, about 4:00 that afternoon. I will miss him every day of my life, as I had been missing him for a long time. Although our separation is much more final and permanent now, I have deep faith that we will see each other again. When I die, I will see him standing there with his arms wide open--he'll smile and say "Welcome home, sweetums!" I love you, Daddy.
