#1 DAD

She spotted the bright blue gift card as we waited in the checkout lane. “#1 DAD” it declared in bold white letters. She reached up, fingered it, traced the letters with the tip of her ink-smudged index finger. She shrugged and a small sigh escaped.

‘“We should’ve got this for Daddy.”

Then she brightened. “We COULD still get it and tie it to a balloon and send it to him that way.”

I smiled, “Do you think Daddy needs a gift card in heaven?”

“Well,” she considered, “no, but he could just HAVE it. Because he’s number one.”

And I wanted to laugh and cry and hug her little self tightly to me. Did you hear that, Kev? You’re NUMBER ONE!

Anyone who knew Kevin could probably tell you all about his little girl. When she started walking, talking, reading, singing…no detail about her was too small to be shared. His greatest joy was being her Daddy.

Before she was born, he filled her room with little things picked up here and there. A beautiful plaque with an engraved good-night verse; a ridiculously large ride-on stuffed elephant we promptly named Ronnie after Kev’s favorite president; an adorably fluffy pink poodle cape set, complete with scarf, mittens and pocket purse.

She had Daddy wrapped around her finger from the very beginning and it only took a smile, a kiss, a “Pweese, Daddy?” and he’d cave. Ice cream after supper? Sure. Piggy-back ride around the house? Hop on, little Bear. Stack the blocks so she could knock them down…over and over and over? No problem. They cuddled in his recliner to read and faced off over intense games of Monopoly Jr. She was Daddy’s girl and he reveled in it.

I will never forget the day he was diagnosed with cancer. He struggled to wake up from the colonoscopy’s anesthesia. And then, finally he did. He looked at me, recognized me, tightened his grip on my hand.

He tried to speak, his throat thick and his mouth thirsty. The words that came out of his mouth chilled me: “I’m never going to see my Bear again.” Then huge, wrenching sobs shook his body, his composure completely unraveled.

Shock doesn’t begin to describe what I felt at that moment. What? What did he just say? What is going on? Why would he say something like that? I couldn’t make sense of his statement. Frightened for him, I felt hot tears forming in the back of my eyes.

“Oh, honey, you are going to see her again,” I reassured him in a voice that shook with my own tears, barely held in check. “She’s with Mom right now, remember? She’s at home. She’s fine. She’s just waiting for us to come home. Wake up, honey. When you wake up, we can go home and see her.”

He was inconsolable. No matter what assurances I gave him, despite my every attempt to reason with him, he was distraught over the idea of never seeing his daughter again. And then, the doctor returned to the recovery room and in one simple sentence – a few words at the most – our world completely changed.

“Okay, then. Well, I found a tumor in the colon and I’m 99.9 percent certain it is cancer.”

The doctor’s words stunned us into silence. Cancer? Did he just say cancer? My mind was racing; my mind was frozen. My eyes caught Kevin’s eyes, reflecting the fear and disbelief that we both felt. Cancer.

From that moment on, everything he did was for his girls. He had eighteen inches of his colon removed, had a portacath installed under his skin. He worked all week, then fought nausea weekend after weekend as chemo drugs dripped into his body, destroying healthy cells along with cancerous ones. He fought with everything he had because he wanted to see his daughter grow up.

I was sorting through papers the other night. It’s what I do when the bed’s too empty and I can’t sleep. And I cried when I came across a stash filed away in a small crate. Page after page of our girl’s love for her Daddy, scribbled in vibrant colors. She was three, maybe four, at the time. Child-like stick figures depicted Daddy, always with brown hair, glasses, and blue jeans. One showed him in bed and she’d instructed me to write on the side: “This is a picture of Daddy. He is holding me. It is day and the sun shines outside. Daddy is laying on the purple bed because he is sick. The blue medicine makes Daddy feel better. Songs make Daddy feel better. I sing music. Let’s hug Daddy.”

There are others, showing stick-figure Yankees and Cowboys – Daddy’s favorite teams. There are homemade Father’s Day cards with crooked rainbows and shaky printing: “I love you, Daddy!” Two pages taped together, titled “My Family” with these words: “My Daddy is good. He loves me.”

And the note that broke my heart wide open. “Daddy, I love you. You do so much for me.”

He did. He really did. He loved her unconditionally and he tried so hard, so very hard, to stay here with her as long as he could.

That’s the kind of Daddy love she knows, and that’s the kind of love she returns. And that’s why she wants to tie a “#1 DAD” gift card to a balloon and send it to him in heaven.

Because to her…he will always be #1.

The Numbers

She rolled the dice. A five and a two. Her blue eyes gleamed as she said with great confidence:

“I’m putting my seven in the ONES column, Mama.”

I looked at her, surprised. The highest number you can get in this game is a nine, and the goal of the game is to create a three-digit number that is greater than your opponent’s number. She’d gotten a seven on her first roll and it seemed reasonable – smart, even – to put that number in her hundreds column.

I pointed to the empty hundreds space on her board.

“Are you sure? You haven’t filled in that space yet…and seven is a pretty high number.”

The smug grin that only a seven-year-old can pull off creased her face.
“Oh, I’m sure, Mama. I know I can beat a seven. I just know it.”

That one. She’s like her Daddy. I’m more cautious, always taking the safe road, not taking any chances. But Kevin was competitive. He liked to push the edges, liked to go for it.

He liked to really live.

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I remember sitting on the edge of Kevin’s hospital bed, clutching his hand, absorbing the blows of the surgeon’s words.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this,” he started, then broke down. This man of God, this doctor who prayed with us and for us, who wanted so much to serve God and heal the sick – he cried for us that afternoon. It was the day before the surgery. The day before we’d remove some colon, remove the tumor, then do some chemo, and get back to our life with our curly-haired, blue-eyed toddler.

“The cancer…it’s already spread into both lungs and the liver. The PET confirmed it. I suspected it after the CT scan the other day, but I didn’t want to alarm you until I knew for sure,” he continued haltingly through his tears.

I’m sure he said more, but neither of us heard it. We sat frozen on the bed as he took our hands and we formed a prayer circle right there in the middle of the hospital room. His words floated over us, circled around us, and we turned it over to God, the only One in control of this spiraling nightmare. And God held us tightly, giving us a peace and strength beyond anything I’d ever felt before.

That night, I curled up on the hospital bed with Kevin and we hugged each other with the urgency you feel after you’ve been brushed by the angel of death’s wings. We whispered promises and prayers and Kevin declared:

“I’m a fighter. I will fight this.”

We met our oncologist and he was hesitant to give a figure, but admitted, based on research and experience, we might have two, maybe three years.

“That would not be unreasonable,” he said, quietly answering the question I’m sure each of his first-time patients put to him: How much time to we have?

“No,” declared Kevin. “I’ll beat that.”

And he did. Nothing spurred Kevin’s competitive juices like hearing cancer statistics. He was going to beat the odds, going to prove that stage four colon cancer did not mean instant death. The cancer fought back, and sometimes it was hard to tell which side the chemotherapy was on. It effectively halted cancer’s stealthy growth at times, but decimated Kevin’s energy. His appetite left, his hair thinned, his face broke out in horrific pustules, but one thing never changed.

His belief that he could beat the numbers.

He was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer in June 2008. He took his last breath, with me lying by his side on our bed, in April 2013.

Almost five years. He battled and fought and we prayed and loved for five years.

Cancer did not win. It claimed that three was the highest number we could possibly get, and only that if we were lucky. Kevin shook his head, grinned determinedly, and he won.

He won five years with me and our daughter, making memories, ensuring that she would know him. She was only two when he was diagnosed and he knew he had to hang on longer than the two, maybe three, years suggested. He won five years of showing her what faith looks like and what courage in God offers and how to love and how to fight and how to not back down when it’s all just too hard. She grew up in those five years, faster than a child should have to, but she grew up knowing her Daddy and learning to be just like him.

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Her Kevin-blue eyes sparkled as she rolled the dice on her last turn, eyeing the “8” I’d just written in my hundreds column.

“I can do it, Mama, don’t worry!” she chortled, her Daddy’s competitive drive coursing through her.

She shook her hands together again, the dice clicked and clacked. Released in the air, they tumbled across the table, and winked their four and five eyes at me.

Nine.

Heaven shook with Kevin’s laughter as his daughter beat the numbers.

I worry about her, about us, about how we live without him, about how she grows up without him. But she’s showing me every day that she’s going to be okay, because she’s loving and spirited and curious and determined to beat the numbers that come along in this imperfect world.

Just like her Daddy.

A Consigliere’s Advice

Out of the blue, debilitated after a weekend of chemo, Kevin caught my hand as I passed by his recliner and pulled me down to his lap, murmuring:

“You could teach Tom Hagen a thing or two.”

Backstory.

Kevin loved The Godfather. The book. The movie. The sequels to the book and movie. He delighted in peppering his conversations with Godfather quotes. He dressed as the Godfather for our daughter’s first Halloween. He grinned his broad smile, blue eyes crinkling with pleasure when he caught a Godfather reference in a television show, pausing and rewinding the scene to watch it again, like a kid, tickled to hear his favorite movie mentioned. The remote control waving in his hand, he’d ask excitedly, “Did you hear that? Did you get that?”

Honestly, at first, I didn’t. I started to watch The Godfather once, got to the horse’s head scene, turned it off, and never looked back. Until Kevin. He made no secret of his fascination with the movie and I became complicit in his pastime of identifying obscure references to the film and adding them to our vocabulary. A favorite of ours when faced with an unpleasant mission: “That’s like saying ‘Sounds fun’ to a ride with Clemenza.” I was particularly proud of this quote because I’d heard it on Gilmore Girls and took ridiculous satisfaction in bringing it to Kev’s attention.

So when I heard his words, I was undone. I knew, for him, that was a Big Deal. I knew he understood the grim situation he faced with his cancer diagnosis and I knew I was the only one he wanted by his side – he’d just confirmed it. To Kevin, I was something the brilliant and competent Tom Hagen never was: a wartime consigliere.

In the book and movie, Tom Hagen was Don Corleone’s adopted son, an Irish street orphan who befriended Sonny and became part of the Corleone family. He went to law school, came back to work for the family, and ended up being their trusted advisor and counselor, their consigliere. But in tough times, the family needed a wartime consigliere, someone to handle the hard decisions, to stand strong under pressure, to face down threats to the family and take extreme measures to eliminate risks. For whatever reason, the family didn’t choose Tom to fill the role.

But Kev thought I had what it took to be his wartime consigliere. He knew that cancer scared me to my core, chewed me up with its nightmarish “what-ifs?” and spit me back out, shaken and numb. But he also knew the incredible reserve of toughness and God-given peace and assurance I drew from. He knew the reality of our future, given his diagnosis. And for him, the only person he trusted to get him through what came next – the surgeries, the chemotherapy, the endless march of drugs and appointments and test after test after test – well, that was me.

For five years, I carried that title proudly. Fighting cancer is not easy; things get bad, then worse. Better, then bad again. Then worse. Until a ride with Clemenza actually does sound like fun.

I sat hours with him in the chemo room, watching the poison drip and his spirit wane. I monitored nausea drugs and flushed ports and unhooked the infusion pump. I urged a healthy diet and exercise, then tempted him with his favorite junk food just to see him eat anything. I prayed and cried and loved and desperately tried to figure out how to change the ending of our story.

In those five years, I learned to think more clearly, to be strong in the face of cancer’s insidious fury, and to counter its attack from the one undeniably strong position I held: Love.

And when Kevin was so tired from the fight, so weak from standing strong and facing down the threat, that was when as his wartime consigliere, I knew what I had to do.

I whispered in his ear the only advice I had left:

“Baby, I love you so much, but if you need to go, you can. It’s okay.”

And, as always, he listened to me.

He wanted so badly to stay with me and our daughter, but his cancer-ransacked body just wouldn’t let him. He let go of the struggle and God took him home. But I had to stay behind, missing him with every breath and wondering what happens to wartime consiglieres when the war is over.