Fifteen years ago today

Fifteen years ago today my father died.  As of now I’ve been living longer without him than I did with him.  It was a Monday morning.  I was in high school, nearing the end of my freshman year, in my Physical Education class.  They called me out, told me to change, that there’s been an emergency and my mother was coming to pick me up.  That’s about the worst thing someone can say, that something has happened but not what.  For the next 20 minutes or so I ran through the scenarios in my head.  I think my aunt was pregnant at the time and I thought maybe she’d had the baby and they wanted to take me to the hospital to see it.  I concluded that was unlikely.  I knew in my gut that someone was either dying or had already died.  And this part I feel guilty about, I thought about who I could stand to lose and who I couldn’t.  I knew my mother was safe, because they said she was coming to get me.  I never thought it would be my dad, never even ran through my head.  I remember the lady in the office wouldn’t look at me.  My mom came in with my stepdad to sign me out.  She looked like she had been crying and my stepdad looked somber.  It seemed like an eternity from the moment they got there until we walked out of the office, I could barely stand it.  My mom told me in the hallway.  It had been a car accident the night before but they’d only found him that morning.  It was a shock.  To this day I can’t remember a time in my life when I felt worse than that very moment.  Right now I feel shaky inside even writing this post.  I don’t often think of the details of that morning like I am now that I’m writing it out.  But I think it’s good to allow the feelings to wash over me instead of trying to fight them, I did that for too long and I don’t think you can really process things if you don’t allow yourself to feel the pain.  At least that’s what I used to tell my patients in therapy.  Although at this point, I’m positive the pain never truly goes away.  But that’s a good thing, people live in our hearts forever and so they are never truly gone.

I miss you dad.

Love,

The Beautiful Lyssa Marie