the mind of a moonstruck mommy

Happy November!

Well, I don’t know how to start this post, so I figured a picture is worth a thousand words.

This is my dad, my little sister, and me at Christmas of 1989.  He was such an amazing father.  He loved to play with us and teach us things and encourage the hell out of us.  When he was a stay at home dad he would bring me hunting, fishing, chopping wood, and all sorts of other great outdoorsy things.  Today is his birthday.  He would have been 51.  For some reason his birthday always makes me think of that other day.

I was nine years old and a week into summer vacation.   My dad, my 4^th grade teacher, her husband, and her brother-in-law left to go fishing early in the morning; some ungodly hour I honestly didn’t even know existed until all-nighters in college and late-night feedings of newborns.  I spent the day around the corner at my cousins’ house being extremely entertained by some idiot in a white Bronco trying to run from the police.  I can remember my 9 year old brain thinking “If he didn’t do anything he wouldn’t be running” and “Does he really think he can get away…. There are news helicopters following him?!?”  After a while I noticed that the phone was ringing an awful lot and all the adults were standing in the kitchen.  I won’t go into the whole thing, mostly because I can’t, but it was bad news.  There was a boating accident a couple miles off the coast and he was dead.  My dad, his best friend, and my 4^th grade teacher were all dead.  A little note of sick irony-when my mom first told me that my dad had died I desperately wanted school to start again so that I could see Mrs. Kirchhof, then my mom told me she died too. Fan-fucking-tastic.

As it turns out Mrs. Kirchhof’s husband, Kyle, was the only one to survive because he tried to swim back for help.  The other 3 waited and ended up getting hypothermia and eventually suffocating/drowning. I read in a newspaper that if they would have been wearing their life jackets properly they wouldn’t have died.  I have no idea if it is true or not and I don’t plan on ever asking because, well, it makes me feel sick to think about.

I don’t know what the point of this post was, except maybe to just get some stuff out of my head.  It has been 14 years since my dad died, but I can’t stop missing him like it was last month.  Maybe I never will, maybe I have just been holding it all in too long…. who knows, but now I’ve let a little of it out, so let’s see how it goes. Hopefully I won’t let all the rest of the crazy spill out too…. Don’t want to scare anyone!

Moonstruck Mommy