This week we will be celebrating our fathers. Cards and gifts will be bought to show them how much we care and more than likely a wonderful dinner will be prepared in their honor too. I loved Father’s Day as much as I loved Mother’s Day but this year both of those days have brought some tears to my eyes. As these days would approach in years past, I would be one of those people standing in front of the Mother’s Day cards and the Father’s Day cards looking at each one and listening to them if they were the musical ones. I would stand there and laugh at some of the cards because card shopping is one of my favorite things to do. One friend has told me that she wished she could pick out just the right card for an individual like I can.
Tears started for Mother’s Day a number of years ago when my Grandma Obenchain passed away. Grandma had a talent of sending out birthday cards to all of her grandchildren each year and I loved getting them from her. In return, I always sent Grandma a Mother’s Day card and a birthday card. The year she passed away was the first year I found myself with tears as I looked at all of the Mother’s Day cards for grandmothers. I didn’t need to buy a grandmother’s card anymore for she had passed away. She was really the only grandparent I ever knew so it wasn’t until I lost her that I realized what she had meant to me. But I missed buying her a card that year.
Then Mother’s Day 1990 came…the year that my mother had passed away. She had only been gone a month when that day of remembrance came. I hadn’t had much time to heal. How my heart ached as I looked at the cards! My mother was always there for her children. Often when we would come home from school she would be baking bread or cookies for us. My mom was one of the best visiting teachers I knew and she took that calling seriously. I remember that when the time came that she couldn’t do it any longer due to her illness how she cried. She was a woman of faith, hope and charity. Yes, I have looked at cards for her in years past but this year I couldn’t! Memories were flooding my mind of this very special woman, wife and mother!
Now Father’s Day 2018 is almost here, Sunday, June 17th! Dad isn’t here to celebrate with any longer. Unlike years before where I would go and look at the cards for mother’s and grandmother’s, I can’t look at Father’s Day cards. My heart aches still as I think of all of the times we spent time together at my house eating dinner on Father’s Day. We didn’t usually miss one. Mom always told me that I was a Daddy’s girl…and I guess I was. My father was such a good man, a wonderful husband and to me the almost perfect daddy!! I still think of him often and the things that I miss – like him swinging his cane beside him instead of using it, his phone calls during the week just to see how I was doing if I hadn’t come by, seeing him pull up to take my garbage for me, watching him with Dora, and spending time together eating dinner on occasion. His memory is all through my home still and they are especially strong right now.
None of these memories are sad memories! They are all happy memories!! Dad and Mom are the best parents that the Lord could have let me have on this earth. I am grateful for their love for each other and also their love for me. I am so happy that they can be together again but oh I do so miss them both. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day will not be the same this year but I will be thanking my Father in Heaven for both of them and for the exemplar lives that they lived. Always honor your parents and remember to take every chance you can to be with them because one day you will turnaround and neither of them will be with you anymore until we will all meet again on the other side of the veil. On that day I get to see them again, I will be running into their arms because I miss them and I love them!!!
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