So I just reposted my April entry, but with captions and edits... :o)
Here's a little taste of my dad's life... tomorrow, he will have been dead for 2 years... :o(
For all the scowling he did, he sure had a cute smile... :o)
Dad's on the right--he and my uncle are being held by my great-grandparents.
Don't tell anyone, but my dad really loved his brother a lot. They didn't show it in the most conventional ways as they got older, but they really cared a lot about each other, albeit secretly... but it was still love. :o)
My dad was a bit unhappy with my gramma taking a picture of him naked... HAHA! :o)
...probably the last time my dad and uncle held hands... hehe.
My gramma sewed their names on their overalls... dad was always a nerd. ;oP
Well, no one's smiling here--not my dad, or my uncle. Boogers... cute kids, though, eh? :o)
So my dad wasn't a bad looking kid--too bad I didn't get his blue eyes. My uncle didn't either, though, so I guess dad was the only lucky one. At least he's got a half smile here... :o)
Didn't smile in this one... so you can't see his lip curl up a little like it always did. :o)
So, there's no rope in this picture... did you notice? Apparently, my dad could start from shore and end on shore when waterskiing and barely get wet. My dad should be right about 20 years old in this pic--I believe he was skiing on Lake Piru.
The only reason I'm here today is because he served in Vietnam after his namber got pulled in the draft. The Vietnam War gave my mother a loving husband, my brother and me a doting father, and my nephew a caring grampa... and cancer took it all away. My niece never got to meet her grampa.:'o(
See the question mark on my dad's birthday cake? Well, since my mom is pregnant with me in this picture, my dad should be turning 40. So much for keeping it a secret, eh? ;o)
On my first houseboating trip--I think on Lake Shasta... we did Lake Mead, too, so it could be Lake Mead--which it kinda' looks like it might be. I dunno--I was, like, 4 in this picture. How the heck would I remember? :oD
He loved off-roading. It really broke his heart when he became so sick he couldn't go anymore. His last trip out was Thanksgiving 2003 with the Dirt Devils in Truckhaven, CA. His rig broke and he had to end his trip early and come home. He traded in his truck for the Hyundai my mom now drives because the damage to the truck didn't make it worth keeping since he couldn't off-road anymore anyway.
As you can see, he totally modified his truck--mostly himself, btw. He lifted it--with his own homemade spring compression contraption since there wasn't one for Isuzu, welded the roof rack (for a soft top, I might add), front and back bumpers, boulder bars (on the sides), and skid plates himself, plus he welded the rack inside the cargo area of the Amigo (which the red cooler you can see through the back window is sitting on). He really loved his truck... his $2,000 BF Goodrich All-Terrain tires were only a fraction of what he spent on it. :o)
This is August, I think, of 2003. We didn't know just yet what was wrong with my dad. He was having a lot of back pain, but our idiot family doctor couldn't figure it out. He was still happy, even while he was hurting, though... he retained his sense of humor most of the way through the cancer--until it overtook his mind a month or two before he died. Once it got in his head, we totally lost him. :o(
His gravesite at the Riverside National Cemetery. At least his final resting place is pretty.
I filled out the paperwork to have every letter you see printed above appear on the stone. I think it was almost worse to have to do all my dad's post-mortem stuff by myself than losing him. If it wasn't for the support from my friends and my mom's friends, I don't know how I would've been able to get through planning my dad's funeral. My mom was paralyzed by her grief, and brother was, well, my brother. Anybody who's really close to me knows about that.Were it not for the mercy of my teachers that semester at school (Spring 2004), I would've failed all my classes.
I don't have digital pics of anything from August 2003 to April 2004 on my computer. The pics above were pictures of pictures. I will eventually, though.
I still miss him very much. I cry all the time thinking about him still, just when no one's looking... I wish he were still here. We still need him. I still need him. :o(
Here's a video I used to sit in the AICA office at school and watch--and cry alone in the dark. PK found me one day and brought me to AICA's advisor Tony to talk... it really helped. It is a beautiful song, though...
Watch this video:
Dance With My Father (Luther Vandross) Video Codes by VideoCodeZone.Com