My Daddy Died Today

I remember he died in 2000, and it was almost the first day of spring. The date was March 21, 2000. He was born in 1910, before World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, yet he was in the military during all but the World War I. He was a career Naval officer with a specialty in codes and ciphers. The obituary has already been published on March 21, 2000; however, there was a misprint that he died on March 22. I am not trying to make a correction or write another obituary.

This is more personal, what it means for a daughter to lose her daddy that she had called Daddy from her earliest memories. From what my mother told me, when Daddy was in Africa for a couple of years during World War II, I would look at his picture and call him my Little Daddy. One of my uncles who lived with us on the farm I called my Big Daddy. I guess it must have been difficult for a toddler to understand what a Daddy was that she had no memories of ever meeting. He went off to war when I was just a baby, and my mother and I went back to the farm to live with my daddy's parents until his return.

Now some 65 years later, those memories that were told to me by my mother of my daddy and the memories from my own experiences with him are almost indistinguishable. The memories come to consciousness from time to time, but especially on the anniversary of his death nine years ago and on his birthday. It doesn't matter what I am doing, but those two days are his days totally. I don't feel a morose sadness, but a pleasant memory of his life and of the relationship of a daughter and a father. Time does heal the loss, but you always have that time of loss. Today is my own personal All Saint's Day or as they say in Mexico, Dia de los Muertos. If I were Catholic, I would have gone to Mass today and lit a candle, so I guess we can say this is my candle for my daddy.

It isn't as though I had the perfect father, but now that I have grown children I can see that my father was a good father, a loving man filled with care and forgiveness for his fellowman, especially his older daughter. I was not an easy daughter to raise. As my mother used to say when I was a teenager that I cursed worse than a drunken sailor. I was all about me, and few people could please me. I used to wonder why I wasn't the most popular girl in school, but I was too self conscious and critical of myself and secretly of most everyone else. Maybe this is the plight of many teenagers and why they are given parents.

I can't think of Daddy without thinking of the good times, the trips, the time he built a board for me to mount the petri dishes of mold for my science project. There's the time he accidentally killed my white persian cat Princess who was asleep on the engine when he started the car. I remember our trips back to Missouri to visit family or our trips to Oklahoma for funerals of family members. Everyone would be asleep but Daddy and me. He was a chain smoker so we were constantly deciding it was too cold with the window down or too smokey with the window up. We'd listen to the radio from all these small town stations across Texas. I was afraid to go to sleep because I was sure I was the designated family member to keep him awake.

Then I have to remember my attitudes, how I'd just have a fit because he chewed his food with the manners of a sailor on a ship or that he turned the radio up too loud. A few times he had a little switch from the a tree he'd use on my legs such as when I'd argue with my mother or fuss with my sister. In more recent years, I burdened him with some of my adult difficulties of a divorce, lack of financial stability, and emotional traumas; yet he was always reassuring, believing in me when no one else did, reassuring me I could do it. That voice of his is still with me today, that I can do it, whatever that may mean in the day.