As soon as we arrived at my childhood home, I ran to the back room and pulled open the bottom desk drawer of the rolltop desk as instructed two weeks earlier. Once I could see the loose files, old tax papers, and canceled checks, I pulled further to reveal a secret compartment. I reached in with anticipation. I had imagined that afternoon and how I would sit on the floor and find the treasure hidden away – a verbal treasure map from my father, who once dove for gold in old forgotten shipwrecks off the coast of Belize.
It was less than two weeks after my 21st birthday when my father died. I had lost so many loved ones in my 21 years of life, but this one felt different. I knew I would have so many questions for this man, and that he would no longer be available to answer.
It was an early morning hour when my mom came in to wake my nearly vacant sleep, “I think it’s time. He will be gone soon.” I heard her shaky somber voice.
Without conscious choice, I smoothly rose like a ghost and followed her into the living room.
We silently took our positions on either side of a hospital bed that had obtrusively taken up space in her home the past few days. My mother grasped one of his hands in hers, and I followed suit. His mouth was barely open, his breathing clattered with the sound of blood in his lungs. The acute leukemia taking over side by side with the non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which he had been diagnosed with six months before.
His eyes were closed. I suddenly felt a nudge of panic. “I will never see his blue eyes again. I missed the last time they were open.” I thought, “They were just so blue.”
What else was I losing? What other opportunity had I failed to capture, to glean, to appreciate? There were no second chances now. This was it. There would be nothing more added to what he had left me.
My father who had spent the last 20 hours crying out, begging God to finally come take him, lay in a welcome solace. The silence he now possessed a relief to my mother and I. His final battle was nearly won.
I always assumed dying “peacefully” in your sleep, taking your last breath, would in fact … be peaceful. Not for my father, as his body so accustomed to a lifetime of strength had fought to survive. Even in his last breath, he was a soldier, a fighter, the “hero” as I had always heard him described.
He had said his last to us sometime before the anguished pleading had begun. Once the fight to die had started, we no longer existed. He was done with this Earth and had already left it behind.
I hadn’t thought to ask my final questions. What questions did I even have? I didn’t know who I would be in the years to come. What trials I would face. What mistakes I would make. What wisdom of his would I have been better for?
———-
Grief-stricken by loss and raw from the battle, I sat there on the floor in my childhood home, in a room that had once served as the emergency dispatch station for our tiny town. My father had lived there alone since my mother had left him.
There in front of the rolltop desk, I recalled two weeks prior.
I had caught a flight on the tiny plane to the tiny airport, then traveled down the coast to my mother’s home, where my dad had been staying. After being separated for years, they had reconciled over his impending mortality.
I knelt before him and convinced my father to let us take him to the hospital. I was the reinforcements, sent in to reciprocate the tough love he had given me those past 20 years.
On the way to the hospital, we remained silent, all three preparing for that moment he would slip away. My father broke the silence, confirming his mind was fixed on the same thoughts.
“The bottom right hand drawer of the desk,” he began, “if you pull it all the way out there is a secret compartment.”
I knew at that moment what it meant. Not just the obvious, he knew his last instructions were now necessary, but more importantly I knew it meant he had left me a letter.
It was the desire we had all expressed through the years as we lost one family member after another to terminal illnesses. A velveteen rabbit plot played out until the Christmas table no longer needed leaves inserted.
“If you know you are going to die, you should leave a letter. Something to give comfort to us left behind,” we would lament as we gathered to grieve. “It would be so easy, and I wish so much they would have.”
My father had always heard these regrets, and I knew he had listened. At one point my mother and I had all but asked that he would.
I reached in the compartment, and felt paper. Pulling it out to my lap I was horrified at what I saw. Green paper, in neat stacks, bound with paper ties. Stacks of cash. Loaf after loaf I pulled these bundles out until I was surrounded, tears flowing down my face as I sobbed.
My mother came into the room and stopped, staring at me. My arms slumped over the cash, palms open, gulping breaths between crying out.
I looked up at her to see the sadness on her face, “There is no letter.”
I cried, “Only all this money. Why would he think I would care about this money? Why is this the most important thing to leave behind? I only wanted a letter.”
I saw the same look I had observed on my mother’s face every time I had been deeply hurt by life. She wanted to save me from the disappointment and knew it was out of her control. It was too late. There would be no letter. The writer was gone.
At the beginning of service the next day a 21 gun-salute cut through me as I held my sleeping niece in the parking lot of the fire station. A place I had grew up in. Each cathartic shot rang out over our small town. Taps were played by the retired soldiers, bringing peace back to my body as I looked out over the ocean and silently cried.
At the end of the service, one after another, people stood to share their tales of “Lucky” Young, their personal hero. They shared of times he had pulled their children out of the ocean, repelled down cliff sides to retrieve them, story after story of how without hesitation he had risked his own life to save theirs, or how he had worked so hard to recover the body of a loved one so they would not be lost forever.
“My father – the hero.” It was how I had been raised. In our small town if you called 911 it rang an old school bell in our house that could be heard from anywhere. Adrenaline would instantly hit. My dad would jump in his rescue car with the words, “Fire Chief/EMS” printed on the side and my mother would run to man the dispatch station. The same room I sat in, surrounded by stacks of cold cash.
I had become numb to the legend of my father. I had always known strangers to come to our door, wanting to give thanks to my dad. Explaining that years earlier my father had rescued them, “Your father is a hero you know, he is the bravest man I have ever met.”
A scrapbook could be filled with clippings from the articles written about the hero “Lucky” Young. In fact I had seen my father starting to make that very thing. I was visiting him shortly after his diagnosis. It was before he had started staying with my mom.
He had been spending his nights clipping himself out of old newspapers. I remember thinking it was a bit odd to want to make a scrapbook of yourself. I chalked it up to nostalgia at the end of life. He was perhaps trying to remind himself that his years on Earth had counted for something. Recounting his “legacy.” An idea everyone echoed at his service.
The clippings seemed rudimentary. It was coming together as I thought a scrapbook made by a tough old cowboy dad would look. A man who wore the same tattered white t-shirts smelling of Old Spice and engine cleaner sitting in front of the evening news crookedly cutting around the newsprint and pasting them inside the large square book.
Odd shapes containing the title of the articles haphazardly placed at the top of pages. He pointed it out to me as though it were a pile of firewood he had been stacking, and other than my amusement that my father was trying his calloused hand at crafting I had paid it little attention.
He said something like, “I thought it could be for you someday, so you will know what I did.”
I think back on that now. I remember my thoughts so clearly. I had been silently assessing our old home. Collections of memories lined the shelves. They now seemed to be my future responsibilities to keep or donate. I looked back to the scrapbook, “I will have to keep that, too,” I thought.
A giant book of articles about my dad and other people I don’t know, stories that have little to do with us. But that has been our whole relationship, I thought.
Stories of his time at war, and stories of rescues that nearly took his own life.
Boar hunts, where he was stuck through the thigh by a tusk, and dives to underwater shipwrecks filled the air whenever a set of willing ears were near.
My mother would comment from the kitchen as my father’s booming voice would rise, “Here we go. It’s someone new, who hasn’t heard them all yet.”
My entire life young men would arrive at our house, maybe friends of my out of town brother, maybe an old foster child of theirs from the days they would parent 10 teenagers at a time, but other occasions it was just a random person who had heard the legends. There was always an open door, enough food, always a spot at the table, and my father was always happy to mute Dan Rather to regale a new guest with his “war stories” as he called them.
I had spent my life watching these young men, siting on the edge of their seat, eyes sparkling as my dad with a flourish of his hands described how the pistol jammed after the, “first shot grazed the wild beast”. How it was only because he kept that knife in his boot that he saved himself in the wilderness that day, as the boar took aim to gore him a second time.
With a large motion, my father would reenact plunging the knife into the back of the boar’s head as he had been lay on his back, the wild pig collapsing on top of him.
We weren’t close, my father and I. He was a force in my life, a lighthouse, and an aggressive sculptor who molded me. But he was not often gentle. And I don’t think he knew what to make of me and my wild energy mingled with fear of being hurt or embarrassed.
I was his exact opposite in many ways. So scared of the dark and nightmares. Afraid of heights and nervous of what could go wrong.
He once tasked me with steering his old truck into the shop as he pushed it down a very gentle grade. I had never steered anything, so as it neared the shop I panicked. I knew it would hit the side so I decided not being in the truck for the “accident” was safer.
I quickly opened the door, jumped out, and ran.
I laugh now as I think of my father watching the scene, me running for cover and his truck crashing into the side of the building, just short of the garage door. I could hear his angry shouting from my shelter beneath the trees.
So could my mother from the house some several yards away. She came to rescue me from his fury and scolded him for thinking an 8-year-old would know how to steer his old work truck.
After putting the piles of money back into its secret compartment, I began to go to work rather aimlessly throughout the quiet house. I sat on a bed in my old bedroom lost at what to do next when my mother walked in.
I instantly recognized the large blue book she held in her hands. That silly scrapbook.
“I think your father left you this she said.” I could tell she was grateful to have something to offer me.
“It’s just a scrapbook of what he did for everyone else,” I hurtfully responded.
“Look inside,” she prompted.
My heart lifted. “A letter?” I thought to myself. Maybe that is why he was sure to point out it was for me; he hid the letter in there. I laid it across my lap and opened it.
What I found inside was not sheets of neatly folded paper pouring out his love and pride for me. Telling me I was his, “beautiful little girl who was perfect in every way” That I would, “be a wild success at everything I put my mind to” and he would “be with me always”. The voiceover from the end of the movie as the daughter reads her father’s words and finds all the love and strength she will ever need.
No, instead neatly pressed inside the cover was a single pink post-it with four lines.
That was all he left me.
Ironically though, first coined by Richard Branson, these words were quoted by a deceased father in a letter to his royal daughter in a scene from “The Princess Diaries”. They nailed the tearjerking VoiceOver in that one.
But now those words were left for me, in father’s off-brand lovely cursive writing.
The brave do not
live forever, but
the curious do
not live at all.
Sometimes in life it takes a while to understand what our loved ones have left behind for us.
Sometimes it is a sonet inked on beautiful parchment, sometimes it is in the example they set for us. Sometimes it is just a happy memory we cherish.
And, sometimes it is a post-it with words that gain meaning each time you need them.
On many occasions since my father took his last breath I have needed those words from him.
Through the years I have better understood why he knew they were the only words he should leave. Everything I would ever need him to say to me were in those four lines.
The advice I would be desperate for when I would forget he was gone and pick up the phone to call, was already summed up in the 14 words that he left behind.
“What should I do?” I ask.
He answers back, “Be brave.”
