People have often told me that there is no way I should still be carrying the grief of losing my father. It’s as if the fact that I never really knew him somehow diminishes my reason and ability to miss him. Those people don’t understand just how cheated I feel for never having the chance to know my dad, or having the ability to hear his stories or feel his hugs. None that I can remember at least.

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While I never really knew much about my father, I am told he was a wonderful man. It’s also said that while he passed from this world while I was still very much a toddler, he is still with me to this day. He’s chosen to make his appearances known when one might least expect it, in unique ways that maybe only I can understand. While some might feel his ghostly presence would be creepy, I find them to be gentle reminders that even though he may not be with me physically, he is still watching over me in one way or another. He wasn’t about to leave his only daughter alone in this cold, cruel world.

He’s even been known to haunt us from time to time.
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I Never Cried For My Father



I have very few memories of my father. I remember riding around in his work van. I remember that I used to love playing with the tons of keys he had hanging in the back. Yet I never understood what they were all for. I remember hiding under the kitchen table at my grandma’s house, ready to jump out and surprise him for his birthday party. He lifted me up in the air and gave me the biggest smile I have ever seen on anyone’s face before. I remember a vacation at the Lake of the Ozarks. I was sitting on the shore, in my mom’s lap as he and my sister tried to push each other into the water. My dad won, but jumped in right after her. Though she wasn’t his own daughter, he loved her like she was. She’s told me many great stories about the father I know very little about.

I was 4-years old when a heart attack took my father from me. He’d been scheduled to have surgery to clear his arteries, a procedure that likely would have prevented the heart attack that took him, just two weeks later. When he passed away, he was at his high school reunion, in a small town, far away from home and the local hospitals that could have saved him. I still have the book from that event and the biography sheet he’d filled out that night. He wrote about his precious daughters, even including my sister. The book serves as an eerie reminder of the last event he’d ever gone to.

Talking about my father never affected me growing up. His death was just something that happened. When people said “oh, I am so sorry”, I shrugged it off. How could I cry for a man I never really knew? I didn’t even call him “Dad”. I called him by his first name, “Dave”, most of the time. Saying the word “Dad” was weird to me since I had no concept of what it was like to have one.

Sometimes though, I convinced myself that he was really alive and that my mom had lied to me about his death so I wouldn’t be upset about him leaving us. Sometimes, when I was angry at her, I would think that perhaps she stole me from him and that he was out there somewhere, trying to find me. I would check the mail every day, hoping that my loving dad would write me a letter, telling me just how much he loved me and missed me and wanted me back in his life. I believed that he would write me someday, I just knew it. But that letter never came. As an adult, I finally visited his grave again. Seeing his name on the tombstone sealed the deal and finally made me realize that my daddy was never going to come home after all.

It’s sad that it took 20 years to finally let that sink in. It was then that I finally cried for my father. I finally realized exactly what I had lost. He was more than just a person I never knew, he was the father I never had a chance to know. I realized that I’d never experienced the feeling of being “daddy’s little girl”, that I’d never had a strong and protective father to help influence me, guide me or tell me that I was his beautiful girl and that some man would be very lucky to love me some day. I’m left to wonder if the absence of my father’s influence led to my lack of self-esteem or my poor choices in partners early on in my life. I never experienced the feeling of unconditional love from a man before so I never believed it was possible. To this day, I still sometimes doubt that it is and have difficulty accepting that any man could truly love me as I am.

My wedding day was bittersweet. My father was not there to walk me down the aisle or lead me out onto the floor for the father/daughter dance. I had planned to walk down the aisle alone and skip the dance entirely, but decided to let my little brother stand in for my father though he could never replace him. My uncle, my father’s brother, surprised me by requesting the first dance and telling me just how proud my father would be of me if he were still alive today.

I’d give anything to have those experiences I missed with my dad back somehow. I’m having trouble letting go and now I can’t think about him without crying. And I think about him constantly. When the new Star Wars movies came out, I wished he were there to see them because I hear he was obsessed with the originals. I wonder what he would have thought of them. Knowing that he was interested in electronics, I wonder what he would have thought about all of today’s gadgets. I am always wondering what he would think of me. Would I have made my father proud? Am I the type of daughter he wanted?

But all I have of him are the memories and the stories that have been passed down to me from my mother and sister. People tell me that I look like him and I have grown to love the features we share like my round face and my dimples.

But when I think about my father, I still see him in his coffin. It hurts that the most vivid memory I have of him is his funeral. I thought he was sleeping at the time and asked my mom why everyone came to watch my dad sleep. She responded by saying, “Because he is a very special person and lots of people love him”. I somehow got the idea in my head that he was famous or a super hero or something because of that. But he was more than all that to the little girl that I once was and the woman I am today. He was my father. And a marvelous one at that.





One of the last photos I have with my dad. The back of the picture says I was 3 and a half years old here. He died 4 months before my 4th birthday.