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 the 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,” one of my sisters said, “wishing on them the heartache and unspeakable 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 had already endured the loss of their only beloved son. If not for our deep faith, strong love and high tolerance for one another’s nerve-wracking ways, we might have been thrown into a dark, drowning abyss, never to resurface. 

But we weren’t, and we did recover. Ah, the resiliency of the human spirit. Who knew?

Dad knew.

How could he not, after all the losses he experienced with his own parents and siblings? His antidote for grief was almost Puritan: work, work, work. 

He ingrained in us the lopsided notion that it was a privilege to get dirt under your fingernails. But he never asked us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.

That’s how you rope people in, you know—stooping down to their level so you don’t lord it over them that you’re the big kahuna, the father who, as 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 already 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 his kids making change long before the age of 5.

“Not like today,” he complained many years later outside a grocery store. “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!”

Yes, Dad could be sarcastic, judgmental and lacking in compassion. But he loved Mom, she adored him, and somehow, some way, they both instilled in us 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? But even in grief, there are happy moments. 

After Dad lost Mom—his wife of 69 years—and after he had developed that insidious Alzheimer’s disease, there was one light moment that made us all laugh.

Just before we lost Dad, my sisters, their families and mine gathered for a summer picnic. We were painfully aware that someone was missing. Of course, that someone was our precious mom, who had died just eight months earlier.

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

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

Dad’s brow furrowed, and his lips quivered as he seemed to reflect on what he had just been told.

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

When something is that heart-wrenching, you have to laugh, or you’ll end up screaming your guts out. Given Dad’s condition, it was an antidote for our hurting hearts. We almost couldn’t separate our laughter from our tears.

We laughed until we cried.

Life is funny that way. 

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