Recently, I caught wind of the fact that a few of our youngest son’s friends were teasing him about how many kids we had in our family—saying surely he, being number 5, must have been an “accident.” It was all in good fun. I think they just rationally found it hard to believe in this day and age people would purposely have 5 kids. I’m leading with this to try in some way, if at all possible, to illustrate this man as a father…
One day when we lived in Phoenix, he came to me and said, “I need TO TALK TO YOU. We are missing someone!”
I looked across the playroom at a sea of children’s heads. Our tweenage daughters 13 and 10 and our 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son and said, “1-2-3-4! No HONEY, everyone is present and accounted for!”
He said, “That’s not what I mean! I’m talking about when I look over my shoulder as I’m backing our van out of the driveway for mass and I see all those little faces looking back, a very strong feeling comes over me that there’s someone else who’s supposed to be back there, someone who isn’t here yet. I think God has a little soul he’s wanting to give us ….I’m trying to say our family is not yet complete.”
I don’t know how another woman walks away from a conversation like that, but suffice it to say, I was pregnant pretty soon after. I didn’t find it necessary to take a pregnancy test right away—I kept putting him off despite his badgering me. But on Thanksgiving Day I guess he couldn’t wait another minute. He busted into the bedroom that morning with a brown bag from Walgreens, handed me the stick—pointed to the bathroom and said, “Go!” I came back and handed him the positive result. He was beside himself with joy, because I guess he wanted to give Thanks on Thanksgiving day.
Some of you may see this as an example of how much we adore our youngest. And we do. He is undoubtedly cherished. But remember at this point we didn’t even know this kid. This story is really a testimony of the unfathomable joy the other 4 children brought their Dad every single minute of every single day. The man didn’t golf, play tennis, hunt, fish or go to Vegas. If he wasn’t working, he was daddying. The word Daddy was a verb in our house.
I think I would like to conclude all of this by describing to you the last few days of my husband’s life.
Three days before he was killed, last Thursday, I was at our daughter’s home babysitting our grandson when he swung by on his way to work. I let him in, he gingerly took the infant from my arms and sat down in their rocking chair cooing and stroking and loving on him. I sat on the couch beside them smiling and tearing up and thinking ironically that the greatest tragedy of my life was that my mother (who worshipped the very ground my husband trod upon) died the day after Our first grandchild was born and would never be privy to the beautiful scene I was witnessing. This great big man in a motorcycle jacket rocking the tiniest little replica of himself.
(And Yes, for those that appreciate irony, I was actually sitting there thinking one week ago that was the Greatest Tragedy Of My Life.)
At that moment he snuggled closer to the baby, deeply inhaled his scent, looked over at me, I’m not going to say he exactly cried, but his eyes glazed over a bit and he hoarsely whispered, “We got to do this 5 times! 5 times. Man—We were blessed!”
A lot of you know my precious mother died just a few months ago. I think Jimmy and I both thought I would be doing better by now and a little further along in the grief process, but the very day after that, last Friday, my grief was so palpable to him that it seemed to be affecting my health. He sat on the edge of our bed, wiping the tears off my cheeks from a sad dream and said,
“I’m going to take the day off and we are going to stay in our jammie-lammies all day long. I know we have the baby today, so I’ll cart his swing and a stack of bottles and diapers up to the media room and we can binge-watch our Netflix series until his little Mama picks him up!”
And that’s just what we did. When our daughter arrived to pick up her baby, he ran up to Panda Express and got us some dinner. We were standing in the kitchen making our plates and he asked me if I was feeling better. I answered honestly,
“A little bit. I just feel so lost, orphaned, abandoned without my mother here. She was my everything until the day I met you. In fact, I shudder to think how terrible life would be for me if I ever were to lose you…”