Is how many days my dad lived, and this is how many days old I am today. 16, 674 days. The average lifespan is 29,000 days, so he lived a few thousand past half.
For those who don't know the story, here is what happened: my dad had a fishing boat. This boat was for sale, but no one was biting (hah!). So, because the school year was supposed to start--dad was a first grade teacher--he decided to take the boat out for one more spin. Why not? It was a beautiful, sunny day in SW Florida.
Except, as most Floridians know, a beautiful, sunny day can quickly turn into a stormy day when it's the middle of summer. And that's what happened. A typical Florida summer rainstorm moved in, and then the Coast Guard found his boat. I answered the phone, and passed it on to my mother. "Is he with you?" asked the Coast Guard. No. So they began to search for him. Then, as Fox Four News likes to do, a blast of breaking news: white male, around 40, found floating in the Harbor.
I found this out by a scream from my mother, and the rest is history. It was a before-and-after moment, and the moment has never left me. It shaped pretty much everything in my life for the immediate decade after (I was 16), and I have spent the next, almost 30, decades unraveling from it all. Healing from it all.
But, revealing the horrors of that day and the decade to follow is not the point of this blog entry. The point is to honor him. I still feel as if I'm discovering who I am; I feel as if I'm awakening from a long winter slumber, and I don't know where I've been for the past 30 years. So, my goal today--and for the days to come--is to honor, to live, and to laugh.
My life is a blessing, and it could be taken away at any moment. My boys are a blessing, and they could be taken away at any moment. So I breathe it in, especially Sila. His head smells like nothing else in this world, and I hope to be able to smell it for the rest of my life.
(1996 is pre-internet time, so I have zero pictures of dad online. So, I'm posting a picture of me to remind me that I am alive--fully).
