Wildleaf

It has been 2 years since my dad passed away. It was a heart attack and brain aneurism in the middle of the night on May 14th, 2005. I was in shock for the week before his funeral, and it wasn’t until the day I viewed his corpse that I thought I had fully accepted that my father was dead.

Keep in mind; this was not one of those fathers that you grew up with tossing the football around. I barely knew him most of my life. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I began to realize who my father was to me. And even then, he wasn’t someone that I look back on fondly. I don’t dislike him. I love him. But his death leaves me, even now, with a cesspool of undefined emotions.

There are things about my dad that I would rather not share with anyone, or know about myself. There were also lessons that I learned from my dad, even if he chose not to teach them. I learned a little bit about self respect, a little about the ups and downs of life, and I learned what it was like to live one life and have my mind leading another.

I don’t want to be like my dad. I want to take some of his characteristics, but am afraid that even a few characteristics that he held could lead me into the life he led. I want to be strong, I want to have an attitude towards work which treats me as the commodity, not the work. I want to build a beautiful fountain in my back yard.

I don’t want to pass away without having a solid relationship with my children. I want to show them I love them, I want to have them know why they miss me. I want them to miss me reading to them while they sat on my lap, I want them to remember the first baseball game I took them to, I want them to be sad I am gone because of the lost experiences.

I don’t want them to feel the way I feel. I don’t want them to miss all of the things they never got to experience with me.