It really hasn’t sunk in , yet. Christmas Day, about 5:00 Central Time I got a call at my wife’s mother’s in Cincinnati from my older brother David in Brentwood TN. “Dad just had a heart attack and died”. It happened in just seconds. My younger brother Mike and his family had just arrived at my Mom and Dad’s, and Dad was just coming in from a walk after learning my brother’s family was arriving. David had given Dad a Kindle Fire just the night before, and my Dad knew Mike had been given one by his co-workers (he manages a team at work). Dad said to Mike “You’ll have to show me how to use the Kindle Fire”. It seems that was the last things my Dad said. Within seconds, he went down. He never regained consciousness. The call from David to me came as the doctors called it less than an hour later at the hospital.
I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to come up with a blog post about Dad. Still a lot of widely scattered memories and thoughts and I feel like my mind is racing to attempt to write something sweeping and encompassing, but that seems like a remote possibility. All I can do is scratch at the surface, especially now.
Mom and Dad brought us up as a church centered family, and a sports enthusiast family. Lots of vacations together. Trips to see the Reds in Crosley, Riverfront (and World Series’ in 1970 and 72) , and to the Cardinals at Busch. The three boys and Dad went to the SEC tourney (they started back in the early 80’s, I started joining them when I moved to Nashville from Cincinnati in 1997). But it was infinitely more than “events”. The funeral is tomorrow, and that is going to be rough, even though there’s going to much celebrating of what Dad meant to us and to so many, and even though Dad lived a full and impactful 79 and a half years. It was jarringly sudden. But I’m starting to take comfort in the sense that Dad is now able to understand what it is I’m trying to do in the life that remains ahead of me (even though, as these past couple of days has brought home, I don’t have any idea how much time this entails). Dad was not a technological person at all. I’m the go-to guy in this family for that. And all my envisioning and writing and activity surrounding the Church and the Web and Social Media has long been something that been of another language to Dad. I feel like we can have those conversations now. Not technical conversations at all, but a spiritual guidance, support for my vision and encouragement where my Dad has taken his significant seat at the table where I go to assess what I’m doing and where I need to go. Dad has always been supportive, but now I feel as if that “glazed over” look when I start talking tech about what I’m trying to do is removed from the equation so that Dad no longer feels like he has nothing to add or how to talk these things with me. I keep thinking about “now we know in part, but then we shall know fully, just as we ourselves are fully known”