Home is where they said
Leave now so we might miss you someday.
~From the poem “Home” by Richard Newman
My parents died last year, within one month and two days of each other, Dad dying on May 8 and Mom on June 10. Perhaps my dad drove heaven so crazy yelling for Evelyn to come fix him a sandwich that the Lord called her home. She waited on him hand and foot for almost all of what would have been sixty-six years of marriage had my dad lived two more days. I was lucky to have them for fifty years.
Sadly, my wife’s parents died in their sixties. I asked Donna when did she stop thinking of them every day. She said, “It finally came after a few years, but I still think of them often. It still hurts.” Yes, it does.
Donna said something that I had never heard anyone express about their parents. She grieves her mother’s death, among many other reasons, because her mother knew things about her that no one else does, particularly those early years of Donna’s childhood of which Donna has no recollection.
I wish I had asked my parents more about their memories of those early years of my life, and even their thoughts when the doctor said to my mother, “You're pregnant.” I suspect her thought was “You have got to be kidding me.” My dad probably didn’t merely think it, he said it aloud, replacing the word “kidding” with one of the four letter variety. After all, my brother was seven years old at the time. I was conceived in November 1959. There were probably times during my mother’s pregnancy that she wishes that she hadn’t snuggled up against my father to warm up a bit on that chilly autumn night. Hearing, “You're pregnant” wasn’t on her Christmas wish list.
Last year was the first year that I didn’t spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with them. It was painful. Of course, it was great to be with my wife and three of our girls. But there was a void that was left unfilled. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure that there will come a day when I won’t think of them every day. But I will always miss you Mom and Dad. Those two empty chairs at the dinner table will never be easy to look at.
