Angelus News | February 23, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 4

Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
food, shelter, clothing, security, order,
warmth, bolted?
Was he crying? Had we made dad
cry?
At last he straightened up. His
beat-up hands dropped to his knees.
His face, unthinkably, was wet with
tears, and so red we thought he might
have had a heart attack. He was still
trembling. He was gasping. But finally
we realized he wasn’t crying. He was
laughing.
“Janet, get me a napkin,” he choked
out, and moved to high-five Ross.
“Don’t spill … HANH HAH … don’t
drop … Lindy Gilman’s kids will
eat even if we’re in the poorhouse!”
… but he was laughing so hard he
couldn’t go on.
Suddenly we sprang into action.
One of us ran for rags. Someone else
started picking out the biggest chunks
of glass. Someone, maybe me, passed
behind the back of dad’s chair and
patted his thinning hair.
But in a way, I am still sitting at that
table with my father: head in hands,
face hidden, present physically, yet a
million miles away.
Sitting with him while he perhaps
contemplated the years stretching
behind and ahead: of waking in the
dark, of driving 40, 60, 90 miles to his
job laying bricks, of standing all day
in bitter cold or scorching heat, of
constant anxiety, constant frustration,
constant fatigue.
Sitting with him knowing that when
he opened his eyes his family —
whose entire purpose, it sometimes
must have seemed, was to break his
heart — was going to be looking back
at him: waiting, bereft, refusing to
leave.
Sitting with him while all that was
good and kind and decent in him, and
all that was fearful and weak and in
pain had perhaps met, and clashed,
and in some place that was unknown
to us, where we could not follow, on
some terrible battlefield in which our
fates hung in the balance, he had
chosen us over himself; had chosen
the spark of life that is humor over
despair, over death.
In a way, that is who I write to. My
father, in that moment before he
lifted his head — and stayed.
For weeks, we’d be finding splinters
of glass under the sewing table, the
desk, the radiators. There would be
more anxiety. There would be more
imaginary — and several real — catastrophes.
But for now, God was in
his heaven and all was right with the
world. Until the next broken bottle of
milk, or window, or leg, or spirit, life
could go on.
Because dad had laughed. Daddy —
our rock — had laughed.
The author and her
father in 1952. | COUR-
TESY HEATHER KING
February 23, 2024 • ANGELUS • 31