As I’ve contemplated for many weeks what type of blog post I would use to introduce my recently-completed writing project, said post came to me, as is typical, through an event most unexpected—an auto repair/disrepair. Less than one day after having my vehicle in the shop, I drove about 40 minutes away to a doctor’s office to take my daughter to an appointment; and, as we turned into the office parking lot, my steering (one of the things that had been repaired the day before) went out.
I tried to remain calm but that was hard for multiple reasons. This was not the plan at all and I had to quickly shift things around, not just logistically, but inside of myself too. After the appointment we were there for and some rapid rearranging, my girl and I ended up sharing a seatbelt in the front (and only) seat of a large, high-up tow truck, as we were driven back to our town and to the shop that had done the work on our car.
Though the people at the shop were reasonably attentive and not unkind at all, something about how things had played out began to bother me at my core; and it wasn’t just the fact that one of their repairs had failed way too soon after it was done. It took a while for me to figure out what was going on in my spirit but, as I fixed dinner, my “ah hah” moment occurred. “They never even said ‘Sorry’!” I exclaimed aloud to myself. “How could they not have said that to us? I just don’t get it!”
And they truly did not. They told us that things like this do just happen, rarely, but at times. They told us that valves and hoses do come unclamped, that “fixes” don’t always take the first time, that we did not have to worry about this happening to us again—but they never apologized about the fact that it happened in the first place. And for that one reason, not for the mechanical fail, I’m pretty confident that I will not be able to trust them again with what’s most precious to me—the life of my child. Just one word can help soothe very deep injuries.
The lack of that word yesterday was all it took for me to go right back to my father’s tragic death, a death which was ruled a suicide. He was on my mind quite a bit before that, actually, because I had not found myself in a big and bouncy delivery truck, a truck similar to my dad’s, for a very long time. And that tow truck, like my dad’s truck, was an International, and it even smelled just as I remember Dad’s smelling, only it carried cars instead of meat. I even told the tow truck driver the story of how Dad had gotten locked in the refrigerated back of his truck once and was rescued by a very drunk man who just happened to walk past the parking lot and see Dad’s truck swaying back and forth (which it was doing because Dad was making it move by dancing all around after he got hoarse from yelling for help).
Yes, Dad was on my mind a lot during this recent car adventure, and especially so once I realized how much the absence of that one word—sorry—affected me. No, Daddy was no longer down here to tell me that he was sorry for all the hurt that the end of his earthly life inflicted upon me. And so, I learned that we oftentimes are forced to move on in this life without the apology we feel like we desperately need. Yes, Dad’s death taught me that lesson, along with many, many other ones.
And such lessons are precisely what my latest book is all about. Home: A Story of Two Fathers is a short memoir about Dad’s life and death. And my hope/prayer is for God to use it to bring about healing for others who were never able to hear that one word either. We can move on without it; it’s not always easy but I do know now that it’s possible. Home is the story of just that: moving on and remembering, all at the very same time.
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