Ten Years After

Ten years ago today my father died. It was expected but still came as a terrible surprise when the hospital called and said he had passed. I wasn't totally prepared for the hole his passing was going to make. I had to call my mom at my sister's house and tell them. That was the single hardest phone call I ever made. What made the whole experience even harder was the fact we had just been to the hospital to see how he was doing and if we should move him to a nursing facility. Dad was going to die it was just that nobody could say just when. We had been told as little as a week or as much as two months. So when I got back to my parents house and the phone was ringing to say he had died shortly after we left, I just couldn't deal with it.

The next few days were busy with making all the arrangements for his funeral. I helped write an obituary, picked music for the funeral, helped call our relatives and a thousand and one other things. I spoke at his funeral, which was really hard hard to do without just breaking up. I was so busy that it wasn't until I was driving home to Idaho from Seattle about a week later that I started to cry. I think I cried for about 100 miles. I'm crying now.

The one thing that most people didn't know or understand about my dad was he was a very shy man. He covered it with stern looks and short pointed statements. He wasn't a very touchy hand holding kind of man. He was always the one standing rather stoically with his hands crossed and a far away look in the all our family pictures. He could be a very hard and unforgiving man which sometimes made him hard to like. As a child I always thought that he must have been born 50 years old and never had been a child. I had a difficult time seeing him as a 5 year old climbing telephone poles and refusing to come down. I couldn't see him chasing cats and rubbing salt into the neighbors screen door. But grandma Tangen said he did all that and more. There are only 3 pictures of him as a child that I have seen. In one he is about 4 years old and wearing what looks like a dress. In the second he is about 9 and has a great big smile and his brother is crying. In the last he is 11 and helping to build their new house in Grand Forks. So I was always sure he had never been a child. I'm not sure when or why he became so shy but as he grew older he did or so said grandma.

My mom was about the only woman my dad spoke with on a regular basis. He didn't have a lot of friends male or female but those he did he held close and thought very highly of. He was a strict father. There were rules and he and mom enforced them very closely. Surprisingly of the two my father was the most willing to bend the rules on occasion. I was the oldest and believe me the rules and I got very little slack. My brother had an easier time of it and that always rankled me. My sister had a very tough time with dad and it colored their relationship. Dad rarely gave my sister any wiggle room and in fact he got a job as a teacher at her high school just to keep an eye on her. I told my sister one time that while she didn't have to forgive dad for the things he did she had better learn to forget what happened if she wanted to have any kind of relationship with dad. She worked at it and things did get better but they were always tense.

I miss my dad. I miss him as much today as I did ten years ago. I still talk to him and I wait patiently for an answer. They are getting harder to hear with time. I have one tape with his voice on it but I still can't hear him. He does show me things. I can feel him pointing out things in the landscape and the colors of the sunsets. He was an amateur astronomer and I still look at the stars. When woodworking I will hold or touch his old square, level and table saw and sometimes he will show how to fix or build something. I just miss talking to him. I never did get to say goodbye.