Happy Father’s Day, Dad

I wrote this on June 16, 2024. A year later, I am ready to begin healing my male energy which was molded through interacting with males in my family growing up. All the goodness about this energy I learned from my husband. It isn’t necessary to have human children to be a supportive Dad to others. Impressive for a man who was raised by his mother. Happy Father’s Day to you, my wonderful husband, from me and “your dog.” We love you.

My friend Donna and I attended a Tim Tebow “Grace For The Family” event. Donna gifted it to me as a birthday present.

I am not so much a sports team fan as I am a “sport” fan and an “athlete” fan. It’s difficult for me to admire individually the amount of people it takes to make up an entire team.

In December of 2022, I was recovering from radiation and steroid treatments and an unsuccessful attempt at “preventative” treatment after two metastases to my brain. I began to grasp the enormity of my diagnosis from the year prior and how stage four cancer was way more than a bunch of grouped together words or a medical condition. So, when cancer returned one year after the primary diagnosis in the form of six brain tumors, the catalyst demanded I come to discoveries, and resolutions – however difficult they would be – for acceptances in my life. Cancer refused to allow me to brush it out of my life in 2021 through 2022, though I tried mightily. I had not yet learned its purpose. It flew straight back at me, wings beating my face – hard.

I could fill a book if I could ever find the words and get them out of me. Having cancer became not about living or dying – it became about an opportunity to live and die better than I would have if I never had cancer.

I found Tim’s 2023 devotional while scanning Amazon. As my hands and feet healed, so did my heart and my soul and my knowing. Each day I turned a page in Tim’s “One-Year Devotional: Mission Possible.” Throughout another year recovering from cause and cure and then a pelvis fracture in late 2023, I read each day what he wrote for me to find. There were some tough days in there. Tim Tebow became my leaning post; he became a brother.

The event was based on its proximity to Father’s Day, the theme male stewardship of family through Christ. Fatherhood. There were other break-offs, all told by Tim through stories of his life more so than Bible scripture. His message applied to any family of any spiritual belief, or no spiritual belief at all, anywhere.

It’s a road of self-discovery, this cancer thing. I have opened wounds, dug them out, cleared margins, cleaned them, accepted and resolved and healed quite a few. Others, I learned through our energy healer Tammy Billups – grow from tired, ancient patterns, aching to be laid to rest. Many that resolved on their own through living life, I blew away as dried seeds of what was once pain. I swept the floor with gratitude for their teachings.

The deepest wounds, too frightening to face, I rapidly bound to stop the bleeding. These, I assured myself, I would come back to. I would receive a key when I was strong enough to unwind tourniquets and open that door. Through Divine Providence, a key was spiraled to me via a spiritual touchdown pass from the greatest professional quarterback who never was.

As Tim spoke of his father, I thought of mine.

I loved my parents. I understand I did not come from their world, their time, and I didn’t know their inner, authentic selves. Neither, as it turns out, did they. It’s scary work, this healing stuff. I try to handle it with much respect and keep facts and memories in context of the times. It is important to me to understand their choices and struggles.

Though, parents have a responsibility to their children.

Avoidance, storing – or boxing as I call it – ignoring, re-direction, low self-worth, selfishness, self-guilt-to-share, invasiveness, deadening silence, explosive rage, crippling mental control and general fearful paralysis was how my folks moved through life and brought up five children. I do know, as they aged, they realized the many dull and broken tools they passed on to us and this legacy began to weigh on them. I see this in myself, without even having children. It’s what you do as you get old or are slapped with mortality.

My parents had no idea how to correct it while life whirled out of their control – nor would they ever ask for help. We all accepted their deficiencies as normal and had gone on with our lives. Instinctively, as we moved through our individual lives, we employed tactics we learned or were given by them.

It is the darker circle of life.

I always gave my father a bye. I made excuses as well as employed the avoidance tactics he so expertly taught me when it came to the hard stuff. As he buried his WWII Army infantry service from us, I buried hard memories of him. Deep. When he slipped into dementia, I watched my oldest brother and my sister react to him as their father and as his caretakers. They knew a vastly different father than I did and surely saw so much more.

As I enter this new phase of healing my relationship with my father, I do know he was a gentle, simple though complex, haunted man.

His father was killed two weeks after he was born in 1921 when a tractor overturned, breaking his neck and crushing his chest while he was driving a grade. I want to say the tractor was new and fancy for 1921, gas engine and all. His obituary referred to him as a “progressive farmer.” Brought back to the house on a horse sled, he was laid on the davenport, my father in a cradle at his feet, until life fled his body. It took him quite a while to die, I remember my father telling me the one time he talked to me about it.

My father’s maternal grandfather, Jonas, moved in to help his daughter manage the farm and raise her four children. He passed when my father was eleven, the final solid male role model of his young life. In later years during a health incident, on a visit my father spoke about Jonas Cross to me. He looked at me like he would, with those considering, see-through, too-much-sun and too-hard-of-a-life blue eyes and told me I was lucky.

“Yeah, Dad?” I smiled at him, happy he found words for me. He always had so few. His old punk grin stretched his face as he pointed at me with a shaky finger. “You – you take after Jonas,” he said. I don’t really know what that meant, though it seemed like a compliment.

During his talk, Tim asked us to think of our fathers and define them with one word. Later, when the host of the event acknowledged Tim’s definition of “passion,” the word he initially assigned to his father, he asked Tim to define his father’s actions in life. Tim grew a little quiet, looked at his host and said simply, “compelling.” I listened to Tim explain with an ear outside of my head while my inner voice whispered a vastly different word regarding my father.

Fear.

I felt the old defense of the hotness of denial rise. I swallowed hard to stuff it down, back to the pit where it had simmered for sixty-two years. Oxygen had been slowly seeping through the door, feeding it life. It’s awake now, and finally, ready to be addressed.

Dad, I will always love you.

It’s important for me you know that. Though I need to move through this, through you and through us, for me to continue this growth and healing. So when we meet again, I will hug you tight, catch your scent and genuinely, with so much love, wish you, a Happy Father’s Day.