I Believe

I have not blogged in a while.  I was starting to write a piece a few months ago during the hurricane, when my friend Bridget McCarthy lost her daughter Avery in a car accident.  It was all I could think about for a while and I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure how.  

The thing that struck me was Bridget's strength after the loss of her daughter, and I was amazed at how her faith in God actually grew after her daughter was gone.  My father lost his brother in  a tragic accident when his brother was 16, and he was 22.  He always said that there is nothing worse than losing a child--and I am positive that is true, but I can tell you that this is pretty bad.  

"My father is dead."  It is a sentence that I have already uttered hundreds of times in the last 24 hours--sometimes to myself and many times to his shocked friends, and even family. After uttering the sentence many people have actually responded "Your father?  John?"  Well. Yes.  That is the only father I have.  Had.  And as my father, who always had a keen sense of mortality and the preciousness of life would remark, "the only one I am ever going to have."

It's the kind of thing he would say to me when I fought with my sister, "she's the only sister you'll ever have."  Obviously, something that echoed what felt when he thought about his brother.  After his brother's death, what faith he had in Catholic church was very much shaken.  But, my father could not shake the belief of a higher power, and the hope that there is another life after this one: one where he would see his brothers and parents again. He never understood how a person could be an atheist and recently said to me, "where's the fun in that?"

I am not an atheist, but I am not an... anything.  I genuinely don't know what I believe, and as I was getting on the plane bound for home I was struck by this emptiness--missing my father, and missing, unlike my friend Bridget, the sense that anyone was with me.  She talks about feeling her daughter's presence and the signs that she is getting from her.  And I thought to myself, "I don't feel him with me at all.  I don't feel anything except heartbroken, and very much alone." and I swear, as I thought it, on the runway in New York, where I was reading aloud to my boyfriend from my dad's book (the only one he every signed to me), the sun broke through what had been six days of overcast weather in New York and the light flooded across the pages. 

My dad always did hate cloudy days.