{"id":17758,"date":"2022-03-11T15:21:12","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T20:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17758"},"modified":"2024-08-27T16:57:59","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T20:57:59","slug":"my-fathers-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/my-fathers-daughter\/","title":{"rendered":"My Father’s Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n My Father’s Daughter\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

For much of my life, I raged internally against my father who died without telling me his stories about his life and adventures. Unlike him, I want to share my favorite experiences and stories exploring the world.
\nWhich is why I signed up for my first writing class.
\nTo my surprise, from the first exercise \u2014 listing 15 turning points in my life \u2014 the one that begged to be written was the night my father died suddenly from a heart attack.
\nIt was the middle of the night. I woke to the sound of my mother running through the dark house.
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d I asked.
\n\u201cYour dad is very ill.\u201d
\nThere was a phone next to their bed, yet she ran through the house to the phone in the kitchen to call our doctor.
\nI got out of bed and tiptoed across the hall to their bedroom. From the foot of the bed, I looked at the still figure, and said to myself \u2014 he\u2019s not ill. He\u2019s dead.
\nAs if in a trance, I walked into the bathroom and said out loud to the face in the mirror \u201cYour life is not going to change.” It felt like a portcullis clanging down, turning off all emotion. I returned to my bedroom and got back into bed.
\nI don\u2019t remember crying. I do remember thinking as I lay alone in bed waiting for the doctor, It\u2019s the wrong parent, why couldn\u2019t it have been my mother?
\nIt was 2 in the morning. Ossining was in a State of Emergency with deep snow from the blizzard. We lived on a steep hill with a view of the Hudson River, but somehow Dr. Reilly made it up to our house and walked down the long path that my father had shoveled that afternoon to go to dinner at our neighbor\u2019s across the street.
\nThe house was cold and quiet, except for the banjo clock ticking relentlessly in the hall. My mother and I waited in my bedroom, each lost in our own thoughts, while Dr. Reilly examined my father. He came back into the hall, all he said was, \u201cI\u2019m very sorry\u201d and we knew. Before he left, he quietly called the funeral home. My mother slipped into bed with me as we waited in shock for the funeral home to come pick up the body.
\nWhen the day dawned, my mother called her cousin, Dorothy, who drove over from Connecticut. I was sent up the hill to neighbors to play in the snow with their children. It was a week before my 12th birthday. I was miserable. I had just lost my father. I was cold and bewildered. I didn\u2019t even like these neighbors very much or their kids. I wanted to be home, in my warm bed, reading, escaping to a world other than the one in which I suddenly found myself.
\nI don\u2019t remember crying but I may have at some point during the week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For much of my life, I raged internally against my father who died without telling me his stories about his life and adventures. Unlike him, I want to share my favorite experiences and stories exploring the world. Which is why I signed up for my first writing class. To my surprise, from the first exercise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17758"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17783,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17758\/revisions\/17783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}