Daddy

Tomorrow, the country will celebrate dads. We'll celebrate old dads and young dads, grandfathers, uncles, cousins, friends, and potential dads. We'll celebrate dads who are no longer living. That's my dad.

Since the summer of 1975, I have not had my dad to hug on Father's Day. When I was 11 years old, he died of heart disease and I just never saw him again.

The effect his death has had on me has been so profound, I can trace back behaviors, mistakes and decisions I have made directly to the experience of losing him. Although I have been without him way longer than I was with him, he is still fresh in my mind. His death may as well be today as 33 years ago - the memories have barely faded.

I remember everything about those first days of decades-ago September, everything from the amazingly complex and beautiful network of a spider web that was spun into the hedges that lined the side of our house, how it dripped and sparkled with morning dew, to the inability to stop crying for one single second during his entire funeral service at the chapel. I remember the plates and bowls of food that crowded a table that had been set up in the living room, a table that reflected the love and support of so incredibly many people who showed up for days of Shiva. I remember the tall, glass-encased candle which sat on the wooden console of our hi-fi stereo and burned for three days straight, and also the fact that somehow I knew that forever on, from the moment my father died, I would never, ever, be the same again.

My dad was so funny, he joked all the time. He would squeeze my knees in a tickle and I would shriek with laughter. He sat on the edge of my bed and told my sister and me bedtime stories every night. Some he made up, like the one where, after repeatedly being denied entrance to the hospital to visit my newborn sister, I decided to dress up as a 64-year-old woman and fooled them! I still laugh at that silly story because my dad told it to me and it was funny! He made the world's best oatmeal on weekend mornings. He'd stand at the stove and stir and stir, adding milk, butter and sugar as he went and what came out of that pot was the most scrumptious bowl of sweet mushy goodness I've never experienced again!

Being so young, I never appreciated the amount of people that man knew. So many people cared enough about him to come to his funeral, that the chapel had to push back the movable wall in order to make enough room for the influx. The place was filled with people who knew, liked, and loved my dad. I sat between my sister and my Bubbie while the rabbi spoke and I do not remember one single word he said. I only cried. The tears came in floods and only stopped because I forced them to.

So, Happy Father's Day, Robert Waldman. I am still your little daughter and I still love and miss you today as much as I did when you were here with me.