I miss my dad. You’d think that having him for 68-3/4 years of my life would satisfy that yearning for a father figure, but no. Like some spoiled-rotten ingrate who can’t get her fill of people and things she cherishes, I wanted him and Mom to go on forever—at least until I went first. “What an incredibly selfish hog you are,” said one of my sisters, “wishing on them heartache and un-speakable sorrow of seeing one of their children go first—again. What kind of daughter are you?” “An incredibly selfish hog,” I echoed, deciding to keep spoiled-rotten ingrate to myself.

Our parents saw their only beloved son go before them and, I tell you, if it wasn’t for our deep faith, strong love and a high tolerance toward one another’s nerve-wracking ways, we might have been thrown into a dark, drowning abyss, never to resurface again. But we weren’t and we did recover. Ah, the resiliency of the human spirit. Who knew?

Dad knew.

How could he not know with all the losses he experienced with his own parents and siblings? His antidote for handling grief was so Puritan: work, work, work. So he ingrained in us, his children, the, lopsided notion that it was a privilege to get dirt under your fingernails. But he didn’t ask of us things that he himself wasn’t willing to do.

That’s how you rope people in, you know—stooping down to their level so you don’t lord it all over them that you’re the big kahuna, the father who, as the head of the household, must feed his family, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I wouldn’t have minded starving a little in any of those areas if only Dad hadn’t bought that darn 10-acre cherry farm. He had a good-paying job at General Motors, but he wanted a hobby to keep little hands busy—mainly ours.

You would have thought our livelihood depended on the nickels and dimes we collected from our roadside fruit stand. Dad got the biggest kick out of all his kids making change long before the age of 5.

“Not like today,” he complained many years later just outside a grocery store. I remembered the bill came to $21.36 and he handed the cashier $22.11 because he needed three quarters.

“That girl looked like I had handed her a note to turn over all her loot. Wouldn’t swap a bushel of my sweet cherries for that dumbbell doozy!” he insisted.

Yes, Dad could be sarcastic, judgmental and lacking in compassion, but he was a devoted family man.

He loved Mom, she adored him, and together they managed to only minimally scar us kids psychologically. Somehow, some way, they both instilled in us such an enthusiasm for life.

But what about when life’s trials knock you down and it’s not just your fingernails and toes in the dirt but your whole darn face? Those are the sad times, but what about the happy moments? Even after Dad lost Mom after 69 years of marriage and he had developed that insidious Alzheimer’s disease, there was a light moment that made us all laugh. Just before we lost Dad, my sisters, their families and mine, were having a summer picnic. We were so aware that someone was missing and, of course, that someone was our precious mom who had passed away just eight months earlier.

Dad was sitting next to me when he turned and asked, “Karen, where’s your mother?”

Repeatedly we had told him, but he couldn’t seem to grasp the unacceptable truth. The doctor had advised us not to keep telling him because he would become very stressed, but my brother-in-law thought that if he said it just one more time, Dad would finally understand

“Now Dad, if I tell you will you try really hard to remember? Mom died, she’s no longer with us.”

Dad’s brow furrowed and his lips quivered when he seemed to reflect on what he was just told.

Suddenly he turned to me, leaned over and asked, “Hey Karen, does your mother know?”

When something is so heart wrenching, you have to laugh or you’ll end up screaming your guts out: “Does your mother know?”

Given Dad’s condition, that was an antidote for our hurting hearts, and we almost couldn’t separate our laughter from our tears. We laughed till we cried—life is funny that way. ■