Breakthrough

I won't put too fine a point on it, but the past nine months have been pure hell.

I knew I would be losing my father someday, but the suddenness with which he was taken from us has hit me pretty hard. I have tried to keep a stiff upper lip and stay busy, because I know that as badly as I am hurting there are people close to me who are hurting even more. I needed to stay strong for them.

But you can only stay strong for so long.

I am not a huge believer in the supernatural. I certainly believe in God in the conventional sense--if you've been reading what I've written here the past couple of years I hope that's evident. I won't rule out something supernatural, but only if all possible natural explanations have been exhausted. And I certainly don't use supernatural forces as a cop-out: "The Devil made me do it" only results in the Infernal One getting credit for lots of work he didn't do. Lazy bastard. One in every project team...

Here I am digressing again.

My daughter started transitional kindergarten today. This is a huge milestone for her. She's now staying at school for a full school day, five days a week. And she's starting to learn to read. Her homework consists of a bag of five books given to us every Monday. We are to read one of the books to her every night.

Morgan absolutely insisted that I read her book to her tonight. Not Mommy, and not a friend of ours who is staying with us who absolutely adores Morgan. It had to be Daddy. And it had to be this book:

Just for some background: my father grew up in and around the Navajo Indian Reservation in New Mexico and claimed to have Navajo ancestry himself. He would often share a lot of the old stories with me when I was growing up. As a very young child I was also very sickly and at times my survival was in serious doubt. My father always encouraged me to make the most of myself in spite of these handicaps, and never allowed me to hide behind them.

So with that in mind, my daughter hands me a book about a Navajo grandfather talking to his grandson about the difficulties the boy, who was born sickly and blind, had early in childhood. More to the point, he talks about how the boy was able to overcome these liabilities and to move beyond the 'dark mountains' in his life.

Boom. There was Dad talking to me, through a story which contained a lot of familiar elements and the persistence of a not-quite-five-year-old girl who was the apple of her Grandpa's eye and certainly is the apple of mine.

I made it through the story, but I am not at all ashamed to admit I was in tears by the end. My son and daughter both gave me a very big hug at the end. It felt good to get some emotions out, even if it did seem unseemly and embarrassing at first. For the first time in nine months, I felt like I could properly grieve!

If this whole setup didn't have my dad's fingerprints on it, then I am hard-pressed to find any set of coincidences or random occurrences that could have lined up so precisely.

I feel as though a huge burden has been lifted. There are still a lot more tears where these came from, but also a lot more to do. And now I feel as though one doesn't have to exclude the other. I finished the night with a nice hard workout. I needed it.

Walk in beauty, Dad. Walk in beauty!