Blog No 10 - “My little surprise package.”
That’s what my dad used to call me because my mom and dad had me very late in life. With two boys and a girl already in their family, I think they thought they were done having children. I guess my mom wanted one more and my dad did not, and lo and behold, ten years after their last child was born, I came storming into the world.
I say “storming” because I was not expected until July. My brothers and dad were in Canada on a fishing trip when I decided to make an appearance. I was born the day my sister got her driver’s license and when my mom went into labor early, my sister backed into the garage in an attempt to drive my mom to the hospital. I’m told that the nuns in the hospital thought my mom was an unwed mother because they didn’t believe her husband was in Canada and not by her side. As they were fishing off an island in the time before cell phones, they didn’t even know I was born until they got home. Quite the surprise…go fishing and come home a dad of four.
It was a bit of a chaotic beginning. But I digress.
My Dad and I in the summer of 1970
I am writing about this today because I am officially in a place where I really miss my dad. At this point, he has been gone longer from my life than he was IN my life. I was only 26 when I lost my dad, and he will be gone 28 years this Thanksgiving. I’m here to tell you that this really stings.
My dad has missed so many things. He missed my graduation from Carroll college, my first classroom and my Bead store in Menomonee Falls. He never saw how we transformed Grandma and Grandpa’s home into our forever home or me finding my stride as an entrepreneur. I can’t even tell you how often I could have used his touch on fixing furniture pieces or how often I ‘ve needed his listening ear.
But my dad lives on.
Usually before I even know I need it, my husband puts me on a plane to Alaska to spend a week with my oldest brother, Joe. Joe is fourteen years older than I am and also my Godfather. Within a few hours of living in his space, I remember my dad.
Brother Joe with a starfish caught in our shrimp pot in Prince William Sound. Don’t worry - we threw it back in the ocean!
August 2024
I see it in the shape of my brother’s fingers and in the way he interacts with his grandchildren. I observe it in the way he prepares food and hear it in his singing voice at church. It’s in the patience he has for my myriad of questions on how things are done in this wild place he calls home. I feel it in the way things have to be done a certain way, every time, because there is a reason that it’s the “right” way. And I see it in the generosity with which he conducts his life and the way he’ll chat up perfect strangers.
When I spend this time in Alaska, it repairs the hole in my heart. It renews the grief in some ways too, but there is relief in remembering. Relief that I haven’t forgotten my dad or the gifts he gave me. Gifts like my siblings.
Gifts like my brother living in the wilds of Alaska.
