~as I reach my father's age~

Come this Sunday morning, along about 10:32 a.m., I will be able to say it.  I have reached my father's age.  

When my father died two weeks before Christmas in 1982, he was only 59 years old.  He had not yet reached his 60th birthday before cancer in both of his lungs and later in his brain would take him from us.  He was alone when he died in the early morning hours there in the hospital back home in Hutchinson, Kansas.  We had all gone home to rest for the night and when the nurse finally called to tell me that he was dead, it was an almost unbelievable thing to imagine. The strange thing I remember is that I was already awake and thinking of him.  He breathed his last as his very kind and loving heart stopped beating at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday,  December 11th.   I loved him so much in life and continue to love him long after he has been gone because, well because he was my dad.  John Scott, Jr. was the finest man that I ever knew and I'm so glad that God chose him to be the father of a little tiny baby who grew up to be me.

For whatever strange reason, in the back of my mind and deep inside my heart I have been waiting all this time since his death now 32 years ago to finally become the age that he was when he died.  I'm not sure why turning the age of 59 has so much meaning to me.  It's really not because I'm soon within the next year to turn the astoundingly awesome age of 60 but rather,  I just want to be the age that he was.  I've been considering a lot of life since I lost my father when I was only 27 years old and I've come to one startling and awakening of a conclusion and that would be that my dad was a very young man when he died.  Not the older person that I always thought in my mind he was, but instead a man who might have had so many more years of life ahead of him had it not been for the lemon sized tumors that presented themselves in his lungs.  He is gone now and I would never call him back to have to live the life that was his for the last 18 months before he passed.  In my mind I can still picture him sitting up in a chair or on the edge of the bed sound asleep because lying down was not an option. Breathing was just too difficult for him to get rest any other way.  Dad's congestive heart failure made it impossible to do surgery and so he underwent rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to buy a little time for himself.  My dad "fought the good fight" that the "Good Book" speaks of and when it was finally all said and done, in God's mercy he found his way back home.  We buried him 4 days later near the grave of my sister who had been killed in an  accident 13 years earlier.  25 years later, we would lay our mother to rest beside him as well.  I'm an orphan now and it just sucks to be one.  Even though I was no longer a "kid", I still needed my parents.  Plain and simple.

I'm not sure what kind of a 59-year old person I will be.  When you look at it, it's only a number.  For my dad, it was his last number.  One final birthday here on earth and since it was his last one, I know that in his own loving manner he would wish for his little girl to have many more birthdays beyond the one that arrives the day after tomorrow.  For that wish to come true, I will surely pray.  I love life and I kinda would like to keep living it :)

My birth certificate registers my name, the one that my father gave me.  I was the 6th child out of seven and I never forgot the "gift" of my birth.  Times had to have been tight every once in a while for my parents and with that many mouths to feed, I'm sure that a whole lot of sacrifices had to have been made.  The sweet thing was that they loved me and my five brothers and sisters enough to have yet another little one, our baby sister Cindy who arrived two years after me.  With that, their Kansas farming family was complete, 17 years after they started it.

God knew just the perfect family for me to born into.  As my good friend LeRoy is always saying, "I love it when a plan comes together!"  For that I will always give thanks.

I have so very few photos of our family all together.  This one was taken in the wheat harvest fields of Kinsley, Kansas in the summer of 1976.  This is not all of us, only a very small part of the clan.  My brother, two of my sisters, two of my nieces and my parents.  Frozen in a moment of time.

The only photo I have of when I was a baby, taken after Grandfather Brown's funeral in 1956.  My mom told me that he held me once and said, "Wouldn't it be nice to be this little once again?"  Although I never knew him to remember, I take a lot of solace in her words of remembrance.  I am the person that I am today because those two people shown above loved one another enough to have me.  For my first birthday and for the all the ones to follow, I am beholden.