Here.

Thanks, Gr3tta. It was a long time ago, but I always think about my dad on May 11.

My dad and I were always close. We had more in common than my mom and I do. We even looked more like each other.



I was away at library school in Illinois when he died. The last time I saw him was the weekend of my son's birthday in March. My parents drove to Urbana to see him. My dad adored my son. He'd had three daughters and really wanted a son. I think he felt close to him as well, because my dad lost two dads as a child - his bio dad put him up for adoption and his adoptive dad died when he was 13. He felt the pain keenly and sympathized with my son whose dad had also abandoned him. So he doted on him. And my son loved his poppo. I sometimes wonder if things might have been different in some way for my son if my dad had lived longer.

The last time we spoke was on Mother's Day - two days before he died. That was the year it rained so hard. I don't know if you remember. The Mississippi was huge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M..._Flood_of_1993. It was massive when I graduated in August and drove over it on the way home. Anyway that's what we talked about - how much it was raining and how wet it was and how he wasn't able to get out and mow the lawn.

He died on a Tuesday which I had long considered the worst day of the week. He hadn't been feeling well for some time and was depressed because of it. He came home from work, and my mom asked him to come out and work on a tree in the front yard. As soon as he got outside he collapsed and died almost immediately. I've always thought it was the perfect way for him to die - very quickly, on a spring day, outside, working on a tree (he loved trees). He wouldn't have liked to linger with a slow death. He didn't like doctors. I think if he could have engineered it, that's pretty close to the death he'd have chosen.

I remember a few months after he died I was home and sitting in the front room with my mom. We heard a very loud bird call from that tree. I've never heard that call before or since. My mom and I just stared at each other. Neither of us are particularly superstitious, but we'd both had the same thought - it was a message from my dad.