When the person you love most in life dies, it doesn’t hurt.  The word “hurt” implies that you can feel something, but all you really feel is numb.

I had a year and a half to prepare for the death of my father, starting with a phone call to my homeroom class.  This was 1985 and way before cell phones.  Our classroom had a wall mounted phone in it, but it could only be used for communicating between classrooms and the administration building.   When it rang my teacher picked it up, listened intently, and then hung up.

“You need to go up to the front office, there is a phone call for you”, he said somberly.

When I arrived it was my mother on the line.  She began to give me the “facts” in her WASPy style, a style of which I have much too often heard come out of my own mouth in the ensuing years.  It’s done in a measured concern type of tone that tries to convey the message, “yes, we have a situation here, but let’s take it step by step and not get ahead of ourselves.”

I stuck with her until the part about a “brain tumor” came up.  Everything after that was a blank.

During a presentation at his office, my father had frozen on a word.  He could not get it out of his mouth.  Then he had a seizure and fell to the floor.  After being rushed to the hospital, he was given a cat scan where they found the source of the problem. 

In the 20+ years since, I have thought about my father often.  He was without a doubt the greatest person I have ever known.  I loved him more than I had loved anyone else in my life, and only with the birth of my children have I loved someone more.  I always say he was like me, but without the “asshole” part, because he had all my good traits and none of my flaws.  

I had long since come to accept the fact that he would not be there with me for the important and special events in my life.  Yet the only thing that I could never come to peace with was that he would never get to meet my children (or they him).

I then had something amazing happen to me, something I never would have expected, and something I never would have believed.  I had a dream.

Once I was at a party, and there was a lady with a decent size group of people standing around her.  As I listened in to the conversation, I figured out that she did dream interpretation.  She was being peppered with all sorts of questions from enthusiastic and hopeful people, wanting to find out the hidden message in their dreams.  Questions about unicorns, and rainbows, and swimming with dolphins.  It was a regular new age conclave.  I walked right in the middle of it and asked her with a straight face;

“I had a dream I was in a pit of naked men, covered in honey.  What do you think that means?”

Suffice to say, that is how I generally feel about dream interpretation.  But this dream I had was such a powerful dream.  A dream where you can hear, and smell, and feel the people in it.  You know, like that dream you had about the girl who sat in front of you in social studies, but never gave you the time of day.  A “sheet changing” dream.

Man, my dreams are never this cool.

In this dream I was at home with my wife.  My daughter was playing in the yard.  With her grandfather.  My father!

There he was, albeit somewhat older, doing his patented “I’ve got your nose” gag, and making her squeal with laughter.  I watched from inside the house, as my wife went about making dinner.  It did not strike me as unusual, that my father was alive and well, and playing with his two year-old granddaughter.  I just felt a sense of calm, of peace, and of all things being right with the world.

Then in an instant it changed.  My daughter suddenly turned and ran into the street.  A sense of fear and dread that only a parent can understand ran through my core.  I saw cars at the end of the street coming her way.  I saw the joy of my life ending.  I saw my reason for living gone.

Almost instantly my father ran for her.  I followed out from the house, but he had a head start and was closer.  She ran down the street and though he tried, he could not catch up with her.  I pushed my legs furiously, seeing that the cars were closing in and my time running out.  I passed up my father, and came within a few feet of her.  I made a mad lunge forward, stretching out as far as I could, and scooped her up into my arms, and to safety.

I awoke to a stillness in my room that clashed with the frenzy of my dream, and at first I was disoriented.  Slowly I began the process of coming back to reality, where you remind yourself that “it was only” a dream.  Then suddenly, something inside of me made me stop.  Something made me want to not only hold that dream, but to make it real.

I now have a two year old son.  As I watch him play, and learn, and grow, I look forward to the day my father comes to visit him as well. 

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