My Goodly Heritage

It was on the news last night. Breaking news without many facts. Breaking news that made my heart drop like a cake baking in the oven when someone jumps in the kitchen. I caught the scattered words -- rescuing them from a burning fire – baby, fire, died. I tried to let go as they scorched my heart. The twenty-seven years sifted away like ashes, and once again I was transported back to another baby, another fire, another death.

In present tense, I look to the chair beside me to see if my husband heard, but he’s sleeping gently, tired from the weekend’s illness and day’s meetings. Later, lying in bed, his body curved into mine like the commas he adds to everything I write, I try to say the words, but they hide in the darkness, crouched in the shadows hard and unyielding. I fall asleep with images of that day in 1987 dancing around in my memory, poking my heart with hot coals.

It is morning, with the light beginning to filter through the draperies, that I share the words. Not in loud, clanging words, but in whispered grief, barely pushing them out, yet needing the comfort that can only come from a sharing of sorrow.

Later, when the bed was made, the suitcase half filled with overnight necessities, and my tea iced beside me, this man I love shared the morning news with more words -- five-month-old, smoke-inhalation, fire fighters. I spoke words that only the man who loves me deeply, who has held me in grief, who has counted every birthday from 1-28, could interpret. I-don’t-want-to-hear-it words. Words not whipping through the air like childhood kites in the wind, but words just loud enough to cross the room and land like daggers in my heart.

Later, it was my oh-so-handsome daddy grieving the loss of his two-months-shy-of-sixty-years wife who helped me stop the tapes in my head. “I can think about it for a while, then I just have to stop,” he told me. My daddy, my hero, once again my teacher. Me, with 57 years of living and learning, realizing again just how much I still lean on  his 79 years of life education. I remember the movie films of my chubby, red-cheeked self, apron  tied around my three-year-middle, dimpled hands patting my taffy, while Daddy showed me how to pull and pull until it was just right. I remember standing on the street corner of downtown Indiana, Pennsylvania, Daddy with his white bag filled with licorice babies or chocolate covered peanuts saying, “Come on, Pammy, if you stick your nose out, they’ll stop for you.” And they did, as I skipped across the street to keep up with my father’s long strides. We’d wait for my follow-the-rules, always-a-lady mother until the buzzer sounded and the walk sign blinked. He taught me to give without a “now what can you do for me?” attitude, to honor parents and respect elders.

When the sting of the daggers subsided, I stood by the sink and thought about my daddy. I found myself taking the remaining ashes of sadness and offering them to God as an offering of thanksgiving that in those ten-years-ago days, interrupted with yellow-tinged and liver-cancer verdicts and 5% chances of life, that my daddy is still here. I followed his example and “stopped thinking about it.” I focused on thanking my Heavenly Father for my earthly daddy. I have a good heritage. And I’m thankful.