Are you winning?

This is something I wrote, 19 days after my dad died. I was back at work, and missing my dad a LOT.  I found it again, looking through my sent e-mails, and thought it needed to be shared again.

We had my dad cremated, and when we picked him up and brought him home, we had a container ready for him. All his life, everything we found for him was too big. The sleeves on shirts were too long, pants were too long, jackets came down too far. Everything was too big. Low and behold, the container was too small. Oh, my mom and I couldn't help but giggle. For 53 years, everything was too big - or at least the last 25 or so. Still, that's a long time to have to alter clothing etc. 53 years. So, just to spice things up, he decides that something has to be too small. What's it going to be... the decorative container we were going to keep him in. What. A. Turkey. So, because of the dad-container debacle, he now resides in a manly-looking hat box on top of my piano. Front and centre. My biggest fan. Just where he'd want to be.

Onward to my aforementioned e-mail:

            My Dad had a love for puzzles. He liked crosswords, Sudoku, those Crypto Quotes you find in the papers, and especially those mind-numbing 3-D puzzles that you could get from Hans Christian Toys – the ones with the ring that you had to somehow get off the metal contraption, or the homemade ones that his Dad made. Any kind of puzzle. He liked games too, solitaire, Tetris, any kind of game that made you think. I would come up behind him while he was playing a computer game, be it Tetris, solitaire, one of his little gem matching games like Bejeweled or various knock-offs, or even if it was while he was doing a crossword puzzle, I would rub his head and ask him “are you winning?” His reply was the same every time: “always.” That’s the same attitude he had towards a lot of things in life, he was always winning, as long as he had his family and friends – and possibly a glass of good wine or a bottle of beer. He was a happy man, always looking at the more positive side of things. I don’t think I have ever heard him say that a puzzle was too challenging, maybe that he’d made a mistake and messed it up somehow, but never that it was too hard. If I did hear him say it, it was very infrequently – a rare moment where my dad wasn’t the smartest man I knew, he had been bested by someone.

            People sometimes say that when they were given the diagnoses of cancer that it wasn’t a death sentence, but an opportunity to live their life as well as they could in the time that they were given. I’ve always thought that, as logical as that sounds, it’s rather hokey. I could tell that my dad thought the same thing as those other people. He didn’t let cancer bring him down, didn’t let it get the best of him. He grabbed life by the horns and did things he wanted to do – as much as he could in the time he was given. He took 4 amazing vacations with his wife – my mom, and one was with his family and his might-as-well-be family. He went in every direction, first it was east to Halifax and P.E.I, then west to Vancouver, north to see where my mom worked in Wasagamack, and then south, to sunny Florida, on a whirlwind trip to Disney World with his family, and some of the best friends a person could have. He made a table, a beautiful table that expands to fit a great number of people, exactly what he wanted for his family. He started to make hope chests for us girls, and he made a lasting impression on his family. He showed us how to live life, and how to deal with death. One of the few times he was bested.

            A good chunk of my memories of my dad are of him laughing, or making someone else laugh. Whenever we had people over, there were frequent bouts of raucous laughter, the best kind. We would be in stitches at the dinner table often, more than likely because of Bryn or me making ridiculous faces at each other, or recalling previous jokes, and having our dad egg us on. One day, we were sitting around the table, bobbing our heads to the music that was playing, and my dad all of a sudden said “Look at us, a bunch of bobble-headed Dycks!” Oh, there was no end to the laughter that ensued. We were literally on the floor, clutching our sides, trying not to choke on our drinks, crying from laughter. The references back to that little joke have never ended, all it takes is for one of us to bob our heads to the music, and someone will chuckle.

            All of my memories have music tied to them. There was always music in our house, and still is in one form or another. First it was records, we could have easily worn out the two Smurfs records we have if we were allowed to. CD’s were next, followed by Bryn taking piano lessons, and then in the more recent years, my singing and piano playing along with Bryn’s piano playing, CD’s, and constant laughter. Laughter will always be considered music to me. Aside from my mom, who constantly is trying to get me to either play piano or sing, or both, my dad was always my biggest fan. I asked him to sing with me in church one time, his reply was “are you sure you want me to sing with you?” He was worried that he wasn’t good enough to sing with me, when all I wanted was to sing with my daddy. One day when I was playing the piano, he and Bryn came up behind me as I was playing “Your Song” by Elton John, and they both joined in. We moved on to “Hallelujah” by Rufus Wainwright, and “Tiny Dancer” also by Elton John. It was probably the most fun I’d had playing piano in a while. A rare treat to have the three of us singing together. One of the things my dad wrote to me in a little letter was that he always enjoyed my piano playing and singing, wanted me to keep it up. In the beginning of April, I got the chance to record a couple songs professionally. I chose “Hallelujah” and “Dream A Little Dream”, two songs that I know my dad liked, one that he had told me numerous times that he wanted me to sing, and a jazz standard, a genre he loved. It was a surprise for him, and I know he loved it, he told me so. He showed it off constantly, brought it to his friends place, played it in the car, and brought it on a family vacation to show it off. He was very proud of his family, beamed with pride. He was the king in his castle, surrounded by four women. Just the way he always wanted it.