Last night I cried myself to sleep. The tears came in a steady stream right out of my eyes, across the bridge of my nose, and onto my pillow. They just kept coming-I couldn’t make them stop. They stopped when I finally fell asleep, I think. In a few hours it would be Father’s Day, and you’re not here for us to give you our silly cards and tell you how much we love and appreciate you. You’re not here because…..you’re over there, and you’re never coming back to over here.
Mother’s Day was hard enough without you here but today is even harder. I’ve looked at so many pictures of you the last few days because I wanted to be taken back to the moments in time they were taken. I wish I could step into those pictures and relive those moments. I wish I could experience being in your presence again. I wish I could touch your face again. I wish I could run my hands across your beard and see how it was perfectly made up of a mixture of copper and white. I wish I could run my fingers through your thick, curly red hair again that all the women who cut it said how beautiful it was, because it really was. I wish I could kiss your full lips again that I was always so jealous of because mine are so thin.
No matter how hard I thought any of the times in those pictures were, they are nothing compared to the hard that is now. No one ever told me when I was young and full of hope and dreams of the future that it might be like this. Why didn’t they? Plenty of people I knew back then had experienced the same painful loss as me, yet they never said a thing. Was it something you weren’t supposed to talk about? Was their pain supposed to be shut away in a dark closet where no one else but them saw and felt it? Why did they suffer in silence? Why didn’t they warn the younger ones that life will sometimes be cruel and rip everything away from you in the blink of an eye? I wish I knew the answers to these questions but I don’t.
Father’s Day with you over there hurts. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t. It doesn’t just hurt for me, it also hurts for our children. It hurts for our grandson, too, even if he’s too young to really understand what this day is about and why you acknowledge it. He just knows his Papa isn’t here anymore and he feels your loss very deeply, every day. It’s criminal that he was robbed of having you here to see him grow into adulthood. You should be here to teach him to skateboard, to surf, and to build things with wood and tools. But, you’re not, because you’re over there.
I shared a picture of you with our children on social media late last night. I wrote that today would be hard, and it is. I said that I wish I could grab ahold of you and pull you back over here from the other side. I wrote that love is eternal and transcends time and space, but that it sure doesn’t make it hurt any less. Today, I hope you feel all the love each one of us has for you and know that we are thankful and grateful for the short time we did have with you here, on this side. I hope you carry all that love inside you every second of every day and will send all your love right back down to us from your home up in the clouds in Heaven.