A good father is one of the most unsung, unpraised, unnoticed, and yet one of the most valuable assets in our society.
—BILLY GRAHAM
Leanne
My favorite memory of my dad is his laughter. He was always laughing. My friends and I would be playing in the basement and hear him laughing through the floorboards. America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV) really got him! It was a Ford family favorite. That and Three Amigos, if that tells you anything. I mean, sometimes he would be laughing so hard he would be pounding the floor with his foot. And, no joke, one night my friend Elisabeth and I were trying to “teach school” over the ruckus of AFV (she and I were in our make-believe classroom down in the laundry room), and we heard this huge thud. Dad had been laughing so hard that he rolled off the sofa.
That’s my memory of our childhood home. So much joy.
Dad’s memories of his own childhood always revolved around food. On my honor, the only thing Dad must have done during his childhood was eat. His favorite saying, of many dad joke–type sayings, was, “Donuts for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pizza for dinner.” As we got older, this was totally not the case; as a family we started eating healthy, but he still claimed the motto. So it’s no surprise that some of my best times with Dad revolved around food too. Mainly the big DQ—that’s Dairy Queen for you less-traveled types. Usually, we would head to Office Depot (our favorite hangout) and then off to Dairy Queen. What can I say? We liked to party.
We’d cruise through town in Dad’s beige (he called it champagne) Ford Taurus, crack the moonroof, and blast the Cocktail soundtrack. It was pretty much a guarantee that we would have to rewind and repeat “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” over and over again. It was the Ford family theme song. (If you’ve never heard it, stop reading and put it on!)
Life in the Ford family was good. It was Leave It to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, Father Knows Best good. But in a single instant, all of that changed.
In 2004 I was living in New York. I had just finished college. I can remember it so clearly. I had just gotten back to my apartment after having this amazing New York day, and I was making dinner when my phone rang. It was my big sister. To this day I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for her to get the words out.
“Dad’s gone,” she said.
I was twenty-two years old, and my dad had died from a heart attack at age sixty-two.
Steve
It came as a total surprise because he was the healthiest man I’d ever met. He had abs! He went to the gym every day, played tennis all the time. Loved tennis. Tennis is what got him. He was playing tennis with three of his friends, like he always did. They told us afterward how much fun they were all having. How he was laughing right before he fell.
Leanne
I still think about that: how we’re all going to experience this kind of loss. Every one of us. I remember thinking that everyone on the planet will feel this someday in some way. I was at the grocery store, just staring at people, thinking, Every one of these people will lose, or has already lost, somebody.
Losing a parent is definitely what you fear most as a child, no matter how old you are. I was in shock. Thank goodness for shock.
I got on the airplane to fly home to Pittsburgh. I was with a friend. “You do not seem like a girl without a dad,” he said. I’ll always remember him saying that, because I still don’t feel like a girl without a dad. Dad was such a strong force. Even now—he’s all over this book! My dad’s presence in my first twenty-two years on the planet is why I am who I am. I was always loved by my parents, and I always felt seen and heard by them.
Steve
The day Dad died, someone—I don’t remember who—called me and said, “Come to the hospital.” But I knew right away something was wrong. That day was a turning point and something that came as a complete shock. Losing Dad was the first real tragedy, real hurt and suffering, that any of us, including our mom, had ever experienced.
Leanne
We always talked about how we hoped our parents would die together. Sounds morbid, but that’s how much we saw and respected their love for one another.
Our parents had a great love story. They met at Duquesne University. Mom was an undergrad, and Dad was a law student there. Dad saw Mom through a crowd and said, “Who’s that girl?”
Mom saw our dad through the crowd and said, “Who’s that old guy?”
Dad was so taken by our mom that he planned a mixer between her sorority and his law fraternity just so he could meet her. She walked in and saw him surrounded by giggling, laughing women, all flirting with him. He immediately walked away from that group to talk to her.
“Hi, Jackie,” he said.
“Hi,” she said, shyly, not knowing how he knew her name. Turns out he had done his research. They hit it off immediately, made each other laugh.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Snidely Whiplash,” he said.
Snidely Whiplash is the villain from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He was the diabolical archenemy of Dudley Do-Right. And really, it was just a funny name.
It stayed a joke of Dad’s; when they were older and far into their marriage, Mom said they’d go to a café and he’d put his name as Snidely on the wait list.
Dad had a massive funeral. A standing-room-only kind of funeral, which was sweet. He had a lot of friends. We didn’t realize how many lives our dad affected until then. People came out of the woodwork. We heard so many stories about how our dad had taken care of so many people, and we just had no idea.
I wish I could have known him now, as an adult, because there are so many things that I want to ask him, so much I want to talk to him about. There are so many books and historical movies and shows that I want to tell him about. And even more, I want to hear what he knows. I wish I had known to ask more questions while I could. We’d be friends. In fact, we were just starting to be friends.
I’d been a tough teen to my dad—stubborn mainly. I was always a good kid, but let’s just say I got my stubbornness from my dad, and that didn’t always make for smooth sailing. I feel bad about that—I wish I’d had more years of friendship with him. But I had some; I had started to grow up. I was just starting to get to know him as a good man instead of as just my dad. I’m so thankful for that.
I find myself acting just like him. I tell bad dad jokes now, the type of jokes I used to roll my eyes at when he would say them. I say them now.
My dad always laughed at his own jokes. I do that now.
Ain’t that the way?
So many people have experienced the death of a parent at a young age; we are not the only ones. In fact, we were “lucky” enough to be adults in our twenties when we lost him. But we are still sadly a part of this secret society of kids who have lost a parent, and there are a lot of us. When you experience it, you’re more able to relate to others who have gone through it. When you haven’t lost anyone, you can be empathetic, but you often don’t know what to say, and you never know how they feel. Now when somebody says to me, “You know, my mom died,” or “My dad died,” instead of buckling up, I’m thankful that I’m able to say, “I am so sorry. How are you holding up?” and really understand their answer.
All this being said, I feel like I had more of a dad in twenty-two years than most people get in a lifetime. He packed it in! And I have to say, somehow, even through the horrible experience of losing him, I feel lucky.
That’s right—because he was so present in our formative years. He is why we are who we are.
And how lucky to have someone so amazing to miss. Someone that even my friends miss. Our friends, our extended family, our cousins—seems everybody he interacted with felt more loved by knowing him. A lot of people really took his passing personally because he was everyone’s dad. Everyone still talks about him. He’s definitely not forgotten. My husband never had a chance to meet him, but he says he feels like he knows him so well because of how often we speak about him and because of the love he left behind for us. It’s amazing what time does, though. That you’re able to smile and function and laugh again. The human spirit is resilient.
Sometimes people lose someone and they don’t talk about it anymore, which is a disservice to that person. Talk about the people you miss; talk about the happy memories; talk about how much they would have loved this day, how much you wish they were here. Remember that having had someone in your life that you loved so much is a true joy, no matter how or when it ends.
Though this is a hard thing to write about, I think it’s a conversation that people should not be afraid to have. Death is not an embarrassment. People are nervous to talk about death and talk about when they lose someone. They don’t want to burden others with their feelings. But I say, get all up in those feelings.
You become very aware of your mortality when someone close to you dies. Being so close to your mortality has its good and bad side. I’m the most optimistic pessimist you’ll ever meet. The life motto that I seem to have made up somewhere along the way is a little messed up: The only thing worse than dyin’ is livin’.
I know, I know. But when you look at it from an eternal and hopeful perspective, it’s actually kind of beautiful. This life is the hard part. It gets better from here.
I stopped going to church for a while after Dad died. Not out of vengeance or anger, but because it was too close to home. Months and months later, I went to the Times Square Church, which has the most incredible gospel choir. They were celebrating and clapping and dancing and singing a song about the presence of the Lord. And I thought, Wow. This is exactly what my dad is doing in heaven right now. He’s pretty much partying. I had never felt closer to him. It was a very surreal and awesome experience.
According to the Bible, there’s lots of singing and dancing in heaven. Sometimes I like to think that maybe Dad and Johnny Cash are sitting around a bonfire together right now, just singing away. They’re probably eating ice cream cones. And they are definitely laughing.