Memorials and Dads

Moments of Grief and Joy.

It was Friday evening, April 26, and I was pulling stuff from the fridge for dinner. My daughter and her best friend were at the kitchen table, chatting and sharing their day with me. I was listening to the new T. Swift, and they’d just gotten back with my car from a teenage adventure. Prom, finals, end of school year, a concert - her first with just her and her friends.

I usually have the alerts on my phone turned off, but the weird, cosmic ringtone interrupted us and made us jump and laugh. I don’t even know how I got that ringtone. I miss calls all the time. I barely know how to use my phone, sometimes. Tonight for some reason, it rang.

 It was my step-dads hospice nurse, Sharnae, sobbing for me to “come quick, Miss Anna-Marie.” I didn’t even ask. I just knew. 

I ran to pee, yelled to my daughter to put some water and ice into my Yeti, grabbed my flip flops and purse and keys and phone and a long-sleeve shirt because I was wearing a tank top with no bra, and I wasn’t about to put on a bra. I was out the door in 90 seconds. 

My parents live 11 miles away from me and it normally takes 20-25 minutes to get there on surface streets. Tonight though, I got on the freeway, pushed hard in rush hour, and made it in thirteen. 

Paramedics had been called, and the police showed up to take reports. Emergency vehicles were everywhere. I parked askew amongst them and ran to the condo. Sharnae met me in the carport. We hugged, and sobbed.

She’d been my stepdad’s nurse for 6 months. My mom, who is 4’10” and uses a walker, got to the point that she couldn’t do it by herself anymore after almost two years of full-time caregiving. Sharnae was good, and she loved him. Of this, I have no doubt.

This woman is my sister, now.

When she first started, they’d bonded, and she caught glimpses of his humor and spark even through the challenges of congestive heart failure. I have no doubt that he loved her, too. She cared for him with a gentle touch, like a mother would. 

And in the end, he was too weak to swallow the pills. All the fucking pills. They’d tried to save him, but he was gone in an instant.

—

He was born an orphan on the island of Kauai in 1946, shortly after the war, and before Hawaii was a state. He was adopted by a nice family and raised on Oahu with an adopted younger sister.  He was told his biological father had been in the war and was of Scottish descent, and his mother had been young, like 16. It was all he knew about his birth.

I said my goodbye to him as he lay on the hospital bed in the living room, still warm to the touch, just a whisper of the vibrant, loud, and jolly man I’d known since I was 15 years old. My Daddy D. A left-handed fellow Virgo. He loved stationary and pens. He loved history. He was the hardest worker I’ve ever known. He had a huge impact on my life and in so many ways.

He wasn’t perfect, but he was good.

My real dad, the Vietnam Vet, the Marine, passed away more than a decade ago. I think about him all the time, especially around Memorial Day. He used to walk in Memorial Day parades and a couple of times had joined Rolling Thunder, traveling to DC on his Harley to honor fellow veterans. Vietnam messed him up, and boy did he suffer - medically, emotionally, PTSD, alcoholism, drug addiction. He died alone and drunk in a trailer park, and it still haunts me. 

And it occurs to me that I’ve really lost two dads. Two very different, imperfect men whom I loved. 

–

I sat with my mom and Sharnae in the kitchen while his body was still in the living room until the funeral home came to pick him up, almost three hours later. I texted my hub, asked him to tell the kids; and to take care of dinner. I went in and talked to Daddy D every so often. I felt his presence still *right* there nearby, and didn’t want him to be lonely or scared. 

He used to tell me of his childhood, spent surfing and swimming and roaming the North Shore, sunburned with curly hair blonded by the sun, working in the Dole pineapple fields, eating fresh fish and island food and driving a VW Beetle with his surfboard sticking out, never knowing a season of weather until he moved to the mainland. He’d suffered a rather gruesome foot injury as a teenager (he stepped in a pineapple crusher) which exempted him from military service, so he went to college instead. 

He’d tried to find information on his birth parents over the years and when he did a DNA test a few years ago, the shock of his life was that he was actually an Eastern European Jew. We all had a good laugh about it, and wondered how that came to be, but it reminds me now that sometimes the greatest mysteries of our lives are never solved. 

He loved that I was looking for my Sicilian family line. He’d gone through my mom’s inherited family documents and put them all in plastic binders with sheet protectors long before I’d become curious about my family history. He made sure things were organized and preserved, and it was only years later that I recognized all the work he’d already done. 

As I sat in the living room with him for a few minutes, in the hours after he passed, I pictured him back there in Hawaii, in the wide blue Pacific, surfing freely with a lean and healthy body, swimming with dolphins in the glinting sunshine, being a teenager again in the 1960’s with his whole life still before him. 

And I thanked him. I thanked him for being what he was for me and teaching me how to use chopsticks and to drive a stick shift and for buying me pens, for encouraging me to follow my dreams to Los Angeles, to Arizona, to write my books. I thanked him for being a good husband to my mom, a good father-in-law to my husband, and a good grandpa to my kids.

The man from the funeral home finally showed up. My mom said goodbye to her husband of 38 years. I went home and stayed up with my husband for a while. I took a Benadryl for sleep, and in my dreams I talked to Daddy D all over again, in full conversation. He looked great, and was joyful, and he was very glad to be where he was. He was just fine, he assured me.

–

The next day, Saturday, happened to be my daughter’s junior prom. She’d been fussing and preparing for weeks.  I drove my daughter to the park with a bunch of her friends, all of them decked out in prom dresses and fresh mani/pedi’s. 

For almost two hours, we took pictures and the girls had fun, and all of us parents stood around and chit-chatted. I didn’t mention anything to anyone.

I just took it all in. Such a beautiful day. There were geese honking and baby ducks swimming and bunnies hopping and bright sunshine and a fountain spraying water in the lake nearby and making rainbows.  

It almost felt surreal. The grief, the joy, the bittersweetness of life as we get older. Watching our parents die and witnessing our kids bloom -  all within 24 hours, sometimes. 

–

In the month since he’s passed, my mom is starting to recuperate, my kids have finished school with honors and awards, I debuted as a publisher with Garage Sale Vinyl, life is mostly good, and I’m grateful, and I'm sad, and I miss my stepdad. Like the ocean waves, grief creeps in and then recedes.  

My son starts his freshman year this year, back at the same school as his older sister for the first time since Kindergarten. She’ll use my car to drive them both to school, which starts in July.  I realized today that last week was the last time I’d be driving either one of them to school on a regular basis. She’ll be off to college next year. 

Ahh, the waves. Sometimes they come out of nowhere and knock you over.  

We are planning a family trip to Hawaii in 2025 to celebrate my daughter’s high school graduation. We took the kids over in 2014 when they were small, and we stayed on the Big Island in an area that is now under lava.  This time we’ve decided to stay on Oahu so that we can take the kids to visit Pearl Harbor, and the USS Arizona Memorial. 

Of course, Daddy D is coming with us, too. At least maybe a tablespoon of him, in a baggie, to sprinkle upon some beautiful beach along the North Shore. I think he’d like that. 

Then a little part of him will finally be home, back where he started. 

May he surf in the sunshine, eternally. 

Richard T. McKee

9/12/46-4/26/24

Daddy D & Me celebrating our September birthdays, 2021.

Daddy D, me, and my mom, 1988.

My real Dad, Mike. 1986.

Dad and Me, 2003.