Thank You, Dad

Thanksgiving Day, 2016

I had just finished eating Thanksgiving Dinner with my in-laws when Amy called me.

“Hey, you need to come to the hospital. We have a meeting with hospice.”

Hospice.

Everyone knows what that word means.

It was only seven days prior that I high-fived my Dad as they wheeled him to physical therapy, which was one of the last steps of recovery from his open-heart surgery. I was so hopeful. In a New York Minute, everything can change.

Last week, Ella asked me if I had any regrets. I told her that my biggest regret is that my Dad never got to meet her and Audrey.

Ella replied, “But I did meet him, Daddy.’

“No, sweetheart, he died before you were born,” I replied

“No, Daddy. Don’t you remember? He sat next to me at that football we went to.”

I took Ella to an SMU football game that year, but nobody sat next to us.

She continued, “The big guy with the grey beard, Daddy. He talked to me the whole game.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Nothing interesting. He just talked about football the whole time,” she replied

Yep, that sounds like Dad. Maybe she did meet him. I haven’t been able to ask Audrey if she’s met him yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve already met.

I’m still fuzzy on the whole heaven/earth continuum. I’ve always looked at heaven as this faraway place that exists in the distant future, but maybe they are closer than I think.

I don’t know if people in heaven can interact with us on earth, but most people I know who have lost someone close will tell you that they’ve seen signs of that person too clearly to be coincidental. I don’t know if Ella did meet Dad, but I can’t rule it out, either. I do know that if God gives people in heaven the opportunity to interact with those they left behind, my Dad would push his way to the front of the line for a chance to meet my girls.

Regardless of whether Ella met him or not, a part of him lives in my girls.

Dad was socially fearless. He never met a stranger. One time we were at Love Field about to take a flight when Dad said he was going to the shoeshine stand. He had been gone for quite a while, and our flight was about to start boarding, so I walked over to the shoeshine stand to investigate why he was taking so long. I saw my Dad carrying on a conversation with a complete stranger sitting next to him, but you would have thought they were old friends by the way they were laughing and carrying on with each other. And I know that complete stranger was someone that Dad had never met before because it was former Dallas Cowboy Randy White.

Ella is socially fearless. That little girl walks up to every complete stranger she sees and strikes up a conversation. I’m sure if Ella meets Randy White someday, I will see them carrying on like old friends. Our family is a bunch of introverts, and only one person had that same quality.

Audrey got Dad’s toughness. That man had a tolerance for pain like nobody I’ve ever seen. When he had his wisdom teeth cut out, he went to work that afternoon. Who does that?

It is hard to believe that someone as cute and little as Audrey can be that tough. We have to give her a growth hormone shot every night, and when I give the shot she doesn’t cry or even flinch (I cry and flinch). She just looks at me with this expression that says, “Is that all you’ve got.” Pain tolerance might be the most important trait Audrey needs to get through her life.

While I will always regret that my kids were born after my Dad died, I will always be thankful for what he gave my little girls.

It’s hard to believe he left us eight years ago today, but maybe it was only his body that left us.