To acknowledge it is to admit it.
And I don't want to.
But I guess I'll start...at the beginning. And that's hard, because I don't remember a moment that WAS the definitive beginning.
You were just always there. I don't remember you NOT being there. It wasn't every day, although sometimes it did seem like it. It wasn't on a regular timetable; you didn't come for dinner every Sunday, or anything like that.
You were just a major part of my life, from early childhood well into my high school years. It was heavily concentrated around my participation in the sports you helped my dad coach, but prior to that, it was you and my dad participating in assorted sports leagues together, and me hovering on the periph, wanting desperately to be a part of this camaraderie and knowing that my ticket in was to show an interest, put in the time, and become an athlete myself.
Totally worked, by the way. But with you? I know I had a ticket in regardless.
You just loved me. You loved me so much I felt like you were kinda my other dad. While I know now that you had that impact on easily hundreds of other kids over the years, at the time I truly believed it was just me.
I was fascinated with you from the beginning. I hadn't been taught that people were different, but in Nevada, faces were a sea of white. Yours was much, much darker. Your skin was like nothing I had ever seen, and I couldn't stop staring at you. What made me realize some people saw that as anything other than a cool thing was the looks on some of those white faces when you would introduce me as your daughter. To their credit, most laughed, but the occasional expressions of confusion and something else I couldn't quite place made me realize that it must be very lonely for you in a town like this. And I was just so happy that you spent so much time with my family that I kind of wanted you to myself, anyway.
Kids don't think much beyond what they see.
I don't remember how old I was...seven? when you showed up one Christmas morning. You were on your way to see your actual daughter, but you came by our house first, with a present.
"I'm on my way to see my daughter," you explained, "but I wanted to come see my other daughter on the way."
You gave me a little pewter container. The lid was also a brooch, and there were two earrings that were part of the design and could be removed and worn.
It was fabulous. You had thought of me, gotten something for me, and brought it to me on the most sacred of all days.
I was all yours after that.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes I didn't want to be all yours. When I did join that echelon of people who chose to play sports, and my dad started coaching my first AAU basketball team, you were right there as his assistant. By then I had acquired all of the hormones associated with being a girl of a certain age. I was awkward. I had bad hair. I had braces. I had acne.
I wasn't the same cute little girl who had first attached herself to you physically and emotionally, and nobody was more aware of that than me.
But you would never know it to look at you. You treated me just the same as you always had, even when I got moody and shut you out. You were patient, and you never, ever stopped trying to teach me. About sports, yes, but also about life.
My favorite moments were the ones in which you dropped that almost-always-present patience with us as a team and showed us some passion. The jumping up and down in a circle of fury on the sidelines. The starting to yell, and then stopping yourself mid-syllable, before you got carried away.
You and my other dad were quite a pair. I don't know how many ejections there were in my years as your basketball student, but I know that none of them were players on the team.
And I loved it. I never fouled out of one game...just not aggressive enough. But my coaches made up for it.
Then my sophomore year concluded, and with it, my basketball career. You had gotten married by then, and you had your own family to fill up your days. You were no longer my coach. And, you know, life happens. People drift apart.
When I did see you, though, it was like not one day had passed. We were right back to the way it had always been, and even when I acted annoyed, I secretly loved it.
Then there were a lot of years when I didn't see you at all. Until our paths crossed again in what would prove to be a shitty, shitty battle for us both, although you took the biggest hit.
I was undergoing treatment for cancer when you found me on Facebook. You coached me again, through messages. You told me you loved me, you told me you were so sorry I was going through this, and you told me I could beat it.
When I had made it through to the other side, it was your turn to get hit with the news. Only you didn't have the cotton-candy version of Cancer Lite that I had. You got hit in a bad spot. I knew it when I heard it, and I know you knew it, too.
And I froze. I tried to encourage you, but I was so blindsided and shell-shocked that I could not be, and was not, the comfort to you that you were to me.
That was inexcusable.
But my mom stayed in touch with you, and would tell me how you were, and that you had sent your love, and I felt like we were connected. And I told myself that so many people loved you that you didn't need me.
And then I heard you had made a comeback. And then I didn't hear anything else for a long time, and I told myself that was a good thing.
But I should have remembered who I was talking about. You were never one to play the victim.
So it was with shock that I took the news Friday that you were very suddenly in a coma.
I went home after receiving the coma news and got the news that you were gone that same night.
I handled it badly. I cried until a noise I didn't even know I could make, a noise I didn't even initially realize was coming from me, shattered the air. A half carton of eggs that had the misfortune of being on the counter died that same night. Some Oreos were severely injured.
I left the house and drove in a blind fury until I ended up, completely spent, back in my driveway.
And none of it made any difference. You were still gone. I read your Facebook wall, which filled up with message after message from your former kids, all of whom had very similar stories to mine.
You had that way about you. You had that way of making every single person feel like they were the most important, hell, the ONLY, person in your life.
How could you do that? How could you possess such a gift and share it so freely, so selflessly, with the world, and not be granted 100 years to keep changing lives?
And THAT is what I hate about life. That's what isn't fair. That's what I will never be okay with.
At the funeral Friday, I stood in line to sign your book, trying to shut out the voices around me, each with its own story of your love and light.
My dad approached me, stretching his arm out for a side hug. As he pulled me in, I expected words of comfort. Instead, he said, "Did you get those time cards dropped off?"
He, too, wasn't ready to think about this cruel finality. Denial is so much easier.
My mother was the same way. As a man walked past to find a seat, she whispered to me that he had 10 kids, and did I know that? She had dried tears on her face, but she was desperately warding off the feelings that hovered like an oppressive smog just overhead, threatening to close in and overwhelm us.
We were willing to grasp at anything that might help us forget the reason we were all there.
It worked for awhile. The pastor made the service feel like a church sermon, which lulled me into believing it was nothing more than that. A speaker had so many humorous anecdotes that each and every one of us could relate to that it became easy to get carried away in the memories.
But then, the end. The pictures overhead. The music.
When "Over the Rainbow" by IZ Kamakawiwo'ole - aka the ukulele version - started, that's when the smog descended.
How could you be gone? How could we not be that little girl and that strong, laughing man anymore? How could it be over in what felt like the blink of an eye?
WHY?
So many people loved you, and so many people mourn you like they have lost their best friend.
And they are all right. You were everyone's best friend. But more importantly, as the funny speaker said, everyone believed that he or she was YOUR best friend.
I love you, dad. See you later.
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