The cover image for this post is a watercolor render of my childhood. A photo almost just like it exists somewhere. Only God knows where now, lost in the fray of caregiving for a decade and a mom who tended to “misplace” everything in the later years of her Alzheimer’s. She threw quite a lot of my childhood and our family memories out by mistake while making room to hoard fabric, yarn, toilet paper, deodorant, mayo (yes, mayo) and plastic bags full of papers nobody needed in the cabinets and closets of my childhood home.
It is burned into my memory, and that is enough.
The memory is a lake at dusk. A sunset sky. Big, puffy clouds. Lightning bugs just beginning to wake up and dance. A fishing rod. A hound dog named Lady who never left my side, or my dad’s when he was around. A father who had nowhere else to be that evening. A girl who didn’t yet know just how rare that was, or would become. A regular July evening of my childhood, back when July and I were still friends.
There are months that belong to everyone and months that belong only to you, and not always in a good way. July used to belong to me in the most beautiful way. It used to be the month I got away with sneaking away from farm chores early to fish and to wander and to explore the pastures without anyone noticing. Today, it belongs to me in the worst kind of way. It is the month the calendar turned against me, the month I learned that time does not care what it takes from you or when.
In July 2015, my father died. His sixty-fourth birthday was July 6. He had struggled with his health for years, especially diabetes, and more so after a battle with cancer just a couple of years before. He had just retired, finally approved for medical disability the year before, at sixty-three.
He had a low blood sugar event that led to a grand mal seizure that led to a stroke that ultimately led to a diabetic coma in the space of a single day: July 13. Lucky 13. He always loved the number 13, because of Apollo 13 and the way a near disaster turned into a triumph of bringing them home. July 13 did not return the favor, though he might say it did. He was on his way home.
He died on July 18. He was buried on July 21. His headstone was placed on July 31.
Thirty one days. An entire man, from celebration to stone, in thirty one days.
I hate July.
What the Record Shows
There is a version of my father that exists on paper. It was written by my mother the morning after he died, and she wouldn’t let me touch it. It lists the facts of him the way facts, and my mother, do… accurately and without warmth.
It says he was sixty four years old. It says he graduated high school in 1969 and attended college and a Free Will Baptist Bible College in Nashville. It says he worked at a paper mill for over thirty years and at Walmart for approximately seventeen. Both at the same time for around fifteen.
It says he was ordained, and at the time of his death was serving as a senior deacon as well as being a faithful congregant of his church, never missing a service unless he was held in place by an IV drip. It says he loved animals, football, NASA, and God. It says he was loved and respected.
It lists his wife of 39 years, his only child, his grandchild, his brothers and his sisters, his pallbearers, his friends. It names the cemetery. It gives the times of the visitation and the service.
All of that is true. None of it is him.
What the Record Cannot Hold
My father was the kind of man who made a room feel different when he walked into it, not because he demanded attention, though he often did, at 6’4″ tall. It was because something settled when he arrived. He was funny in a way that was completely his own, the kind of funny that sneaks up on you, that doesn’t announce itself or wait for applause. He was a master of one liners. He was a storyteller. He was a gardener, a fisherman and an outdoorsman. He was a man who watched his team play with the same investment every single time, as if the outcome were never guaranteed.
He sang bass in the church choir for more than 30 years, until he lost his singing voice after cancer, and for many years belted out perfect harmony in a gospel quartet that traveled around our state with my mother, who played the piano when they weren’t singing a cappella, and me until I was about 12. He worshipped confidently and he prayed incessantly and often publicly, for friends and strangers. He never did either with hesitation. He showed up for his church not as performance but as a way of being.
He was a mix of everything depending on the day. He could hold a room or hold a silence. He could make you laugh until you couldn’t breathe and then say something that stabbed your soul and stopped you cold with its truth. He was present in a way I have never been able to fully describe to people who never got to meet him, and I don’t expect that to change.
He had nicknames for me that changed over the years, which is its own kind of love language, the kind that tracks who you are becoming instead of fixing you to who you were. He was not the kind of father who let me be exactly who I was without correction, and I am grateful for that now even when I was not then. He believed in discipline the way his generation did, without apology and without negotiation, and in my pre-teen years especially, before I learned the difference between having a truth and needing everyone in the county to hear it at full volume, he made sure I understood that there were consequences for the way I chose to deliver myself to the world. He did not “spare the rod,” though he did “spoil the child”… he guided and protected me until the day he fell unconscious.
What he did do, once I learned to shut up and listen, was meet me there and love me fully in that quieter version of myself that still had every opinion but had learned when to hold it. He defended me when nobody else did. He was proud of me out loud, not just in private. He was there for the small things when most people only show up for the big ones. He saw me, the real me, in a way that I have not experienced from many people since, and maybe that is the truest thing I can say about him.
His faith was not decorative. It was not a Sunday habit or a social identity or a checkbox he maintained for appearances. It was the organizing principle of his life, the thing everything else grew around. He once drove what he and another minister witnessed as a literal demon out of my adult home, after an unfortunate, uneducated automatic writing experiment I did, and he did it without flinching and without making me feel like anything other than his daughter who needed her father. He planted seeds in me with that faith that I did not even know were there until years after he was gone, until I had done enough of my own dying and breaking and rebuilding to finally see what had been growing in the dark all along.
He gave me roots and wings and did not live to see what I did with them. I think about that more than I can say.
What July Asked of Me
I was there for all of it. I have to say that, though I have never liked to, and not because I want credit but because it is part of the story and I am not going to leave it out. A handful of people came and went over those five days. Most were too busy with their own lives and its demands, and I understood. When he went into the C-ICU, I did not leave. I refused to leave, and the hospital, despite the rules, allowed me to stay. 24/7. I still don’t know how that happened. Today, I’d say it was God’s favor on both of us. Back then, I just thought it was normal. It was not.
I showered in his room. I slept in a chair beside his bed with my feet propped up on it, toes tucked under his forearm. I read things I had written, both in general and specifically for him, because I needed him to hear my voice and the things I didn’t want to forget to say even if I did not know whether he could. I played his favorite Gaither Vocal Band songs, especially the ones with his hero, George Younce on bass, and sang along for him. I watched Apollo 13 and Twister and Independence Day and Tombstone with him in that room, his favorites, even though he was not there in any way I could measure. I needed to do it anyway, because he could hear it, and hearing it might have made it more like home for him.
The evening before he went into the coma, when he was still in the ER, he opened his eyes one last time. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open them for anyone else. My mother begged and begged him to. He opened them for me. I saw his blue eyes and I told him I wasn’t leaving, that it was going to be OK. I didn’t leave. I have been little more than merely “OK” since. He never opened his eyes again after that moment, but I have held that moment like something breakable ever since, because it is, and because I know what it means and I am not willing to let it get ordinary.
My mother was already in early decline by then, not able to manage what was being asked of her, understanding very little of it, not even grasping that he was not going to wake up, and so the hospital came to me. I was his only child. They needed someone competent to understand what the doctors were telling us and to make the decision about removing life support. That person was me. They got my mother to understand enough to sign his power of attorney over to me, in a small little office/breakroom in the ICU. The same afternoon, I signed the paperwork. I made the call, on my own, the way you make a decision when there is no one beside you who can carry it with you.
I prayed, I begged God to be with me. To give me strength. To let me know that it was the right thing to do. I never felt or heard a thing back then, and now I understand why. I spent years with the feeling that I killed him, though I know I did not. I know what the machines showed and what the doctors said and what the truth of the situation was. But knowing something and feeling it are not the same country… not even the same planet, in a moment like that. Grief does not wait for you to sort out the difference before it moves in.
What I have come to, slowly and not without cost, is this: he already knew it would be me. We never said it out loud. We never had to. He knew I was the one who would be there, the one who would not flinch, the one who would do what needed to be done and love him through every second of it. He knew. That is where I landed. I followed through.
After they removed life support I stayed beside him the way you stay beside something you are not ready to release but know you must. I held his arm and his hand. I laid my head on him and listened. When his breathing changed into something that sounded like labor, I asked the nurses to come back with more of the medication they were giving him so he would not struggle, and within a minute of that second dose the room went still. I was right there. I was holding on. I did not let him go alone, and he did not let me be wrong about him. He never did.
What He Left Inside Me
Losing him changed how I love people. It made me willing to do it even when it costs me. Maybe especially then, because I not only watched but lived what love that does not flinch looks like when it matters most, and I could not unfeel it. I learned it from him the way you learn things from people before you know you are being taught, by watching them do it without announcement, without asking to be witnessed, without stopping when it got hard or inconvenient or painful to keep going.
My father did not love at a comfortable distance. He loved all the way in, all the way to the end, and somewhere in that hospital room I understood for the first time that love is not a feeling you manage. It is a decision you make and keep making even when the person you are making it for can no longer make it back.
Those five days single-handedly changed what I write about and what I am willing to say out loud about hard things, even about embarrassing things, because I understood what he had always shown me, all my life: that truth told directly is its own kind of gift, even when it lands awkward or heavy. He was not subtle about love. He was not careful with it in the way that keeps you safe, but empty. He gave love the way he gave everything, with wisdom but without holding back enough to protect himself. I am still learning what it means to do the same. I try my best, but I don’t think I can out-love him.
Those five days also gave me something I did not expect and do not know how to explain cleanly: a deep, abiding respect for death itself. Not a morbid one, but a philosophical and spiritual one. I stood at the edge of it, day after day, and watched someone I loved cross over, and it rearranged something fundamental in how I understand what this life is and what comes after it. I carried that with me for my two best friends, and my mother. My father taught me how. Without those five days, I don’t think I could have done any of it.
I fought my father for 35 years about faith. Specifically, his version of faith. Ultimately, his faith planted seeds, and my faith today is a tree. I do not think that is a coincidence.
Where He Is
He was a minister. He was a deacon. He was a believer. He was a man whose faith was real and lived and not performed, and I know where that kind of faith leads. I know where he is. I will see him again, and that is not wishful thinking or the thing people say at funerals to get through the moment. It is the thing I am staking my entire life on, with every choice I make, and I am staking it without apology.
Until then, I hate July.
I will probably always hate July. The calendar will turn to it every year and I will feel the weight of every single date like a stone, and I will sit with that weight because it is the price of having loved someone that much. I would not trade it for anything in the world. I will never love any other way.
Happy early earthly birthday, Daddy. I miss you every day. Save me a seat at the grown-up’s table. I’m still your little girl, but I think I finally earned it. And you are the man who made sure I could.
Agape panta hypomenei.
My love and prayers are with you. Reach out if you need anything. I’m always here for you.
My love and prayers are with you. Reach out if you need anything.