A Room With A View. A Tale For Father's Day.

My father and I weren't super close. He had terrible health starting at 36 (and a string of heart attacks) and he really took the "Boy Named Sue Route" in some aspects. I was 10 and they gave him only a couple of years to live. So, my dad made me stand up like a man. No crying. No running for help. Just deal with the damned problem as best you can and stand up and take the consequences of the choices you made.

Hard stuff for 10. But 36 is awfully young to be planning your death. Hard stuff for 36.

But despite laying on deathbed after deathbed, after being given last rights more than once, the guy just hung on. Heart attack after heart attack, one on a riverbank where his best buddy did CPR for half an hour before life flight zapped him on the helicopter. His heart started back up but when we got to the hospital the dr. said, "He won't wake up, and you wouldn't want him to. He'd most likely be a vegetable." Hard words for my mom to hear, he was just 45.

A few hours later he woke up and said, "Where am I? I was fishing." I looked at the Dr. when he said it. He was standing there with a look of shock on his face and his mouth hanging open. This was a dead man talking.

A few months before I graduated from college I was in a terrible car accident. T-boned in a little Toyota by a kid seeing how fast his new Dodge Charger would go. (at least to 85...that's what he was going when he hit me). The cop at the scene said I should have died. I didn't. But, it was decided as soon as I was out of the woods I'd be moving home. I was heartbroken. It was terrible. I was so close to graduating with a double major.

It was something my dad understood. He broke both knees in a college football game and had had to move home from college as well. He knew how hard it was going to be.

And I was freaking out. Saying goodbye to my health, my friends, my cool college apartment. And I was moving home to our teeny tiny 1920s farmhouse where my room was smaller than my dorm room had been. Horrible.

And when I got home, and I limped my way sadly back to my tiny dark high school bedroom, I couldn't help but start to cry. No 22 year old wants to go back to high school. And I opened the room to my tiny bedroom and, well, it wasn't there.

My father, despite his crappy health, was a builder, and he had built an addition on the back of our tiny house. There was a giant closet for all of my boxes from college, a big giant window right at the level of the bed so I could see outside, a wall of shelves to put my stuff on, a desk to sit at. No more dark little room, it was bright and sunny and big and wonderful.

He wouldn't talk about it. Barely accepted my tearful thank you. Walked off to the barn to get away from all those human emotions. But a man with a sick heart and a bad body built me something I could never ever forget. He built me a place to heal. He built my frail emotional state a place that wasn't stepping back. He saved me.

He was gone soon after. And when my mom sold the house I wept over that addition. It wasn't something I could pack up and take with me though so I said my goodbyes to the biggest kindness I've ever been given.

Happy Father's Day Dad, and thank you for not naming me "Sue".

Share some thoughts of your father with us. It's a good day for that.