Rain

June 17, 2008

Near the house where I used to live about seven miles outside of Tyler, Texas, dewberry vines grow wild. Dewberries are similar to blackberries. In fact, that's what we thought they were, at first, until someone corrected us. They taste similar, and they look exactly like blackberries.

A mass of vines used to grow by the country road along my parents' property. We often walked along the road with a container, collecting ripe berries. Mom made cobbler sometimes, and we often ate the berries with just a sprinkling of sugar for dessert.

One time, I wanted to go out and pick berries. It was raining, but because I love the rain, I didn't let that stop me. I invited my Dad to join me. He looked at me like I was a little nuts, but after a brief moment of consideration, he shrugged and went along with me. He wore this floppy hat to keep the rain off his head. I have a clear picture in the album of my mind of him bent over the berry vines, holding a colander of berries, looking at me with a smile on his face that said, "This is crazy, but I love it!"

That was my Dad.

He was up for anything. He loved life's little adventures. He loved to learn new things. He loved meeting people, striking up conversations with total strangers. He liked horses. He liked archery. He loved to read, and he wanted to write a book with me. He kept a few notebooks and sometimes wrote about issues that bothered him or details about his family history and his own life. He loved his wife, my mother, with a delicious ferocity I see in my husband's love for me. He adored his children, all of us, even though my older brother did a great deal to test that love.

Dad's love never faltered.

He had a passion for life that lasted through all 81 of his years. Even near the end, when kidney disease began to take him away from us, there were flickers of his undaunted spirit that came through his exhaustion and physical suffering. He was a mountain of a man in spirit, in nobility, in integrity, in hope, yet he was tender and loving and accepting.

Sometimes when Mom and I talk about Dad, she shares a memory of me and him standing at the front door of our home in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I grew up. In her memory, I am small, maybe three years old, and I am standing next to my Dad, watching the rain. Mom says it's one of the sweetest memories she has.

Me, too.

Five years ago today, in a hospital in Tyler, Texas, my father's bright, bright light went out. I watched him die, the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. His gone-ness echoes through my life every single day, and I cannot imagine it ever won't. There's an empty space in me that sweet memories of my Dad soothe but never fill.

I miss him so, so much.

What helps is having a little brother who is a lot like our Dad in so many ways and who lives our father's legacies in the way he takes good care of his wife, works hard, enjoys life fully, and is an amazing Dad to his own daughter.

If Dad could see you right now, little brother, he would burst with pride.

The day Dad died, another Tuesday, it rained and rained. I remember standing at a window, watching the rain fall as I called my father's sister to tell her he was gone. It fit, somehow, the rain drawing the curtain closed on my father's life when two of my favorite memories of him, two memories that soothe my grief, are of spending time with him and the rain.