The Day My Dad Died

I’ll never forget the day my dad died. It was five days before Christmas, December 25, 1996. I was ten. My mother woke us up and got us ready for school, which was odd because my father usually did this because my mother worked over night.

She told me that Dad was sick, and I didn’t think much of it. We got ready for school and went out to catch the bus.

I have no idea what I learned in school that day, but I do know that I was in theater class, the last class of the day, when I was called to the principal’s office. At ten years of age, I was terrified. You don’t get called to the principal’s office unless you’ve done something wrong.

I tried to pry information from the teacher who came to get me from class. She said something deflective that I don’t remember. I remember the walk seeming to last forever. As we entered the principal’s office, I saw my mother, brother and sister.

My mother looked like she had been crying. When I sat down, the principal said, “you’re mother has something she needs to tell you.”

And then came the only thing said that day that I remember verbatim. “I found your father dead this morning.” Even as she said it, it was obvious that she had been holding it together just long enough to say those words.

My brother and sister started crying. For me, time was frozen. I was running through possible permutations in my head, “this is a punishment of some kind, or a joke.” I didn’t say a word the entire ride home.

It wasn’t until we pulled into the driveway that I even noticed that one of my mother’s friends had been driving. I ran immediately into the house, down the stairs and into the den, convinced that he’d be there. He wasn’t.

I sat at the computer and started playing with a program he and I had been working on. I don’t know how long it was before my father’s friend knocked on the door and asked what I was doing.

“Fixing it,” I said. It was just a simple calculator and today would take me no time to write. But, I was ten; it was a challenge. And my father was helping with it. So now I had to fix it.

That night, I had a dream that my father was talking to me. And when I woke up the next morning, it sunk in. He was gone. Forever.

I didn’t cry for almost a week. We went to Pennsylvania for Christmas to be with family and it wasn’t until I got home, and was entirely alone in the bedroom my brother and I shared, that I broke down.

At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of any of my actions. Later, I would learn about the stages of grief.

That’s the year I stopped believing in Santa Claus.