A Chapter I Never Wanted to Write

Good morning Substack!

This is a short excerpt from one of the chapters I am working on in my book, House of Ashes. Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of my father.

Robert W. Reed Jr.

February 17, 1942 – February 8, 2006

See you soon ❤️

Five more Minutes

It was Wednesday, February 8, 2006. At 9:03 a.m., my hands were on my father’s wrist, feeling a faint thumping in his veins. For almost two weeks he had been lying there, no communication at all.

My mother hadn’t been there since the day he was admitted into the emergency room. He was the love of her life, and yet she wasn’t there. I couldn’t understand it. People told me that everyone has their own way of “dealing,” but does that really matter? Deal or don’t deal, you’re supposed to show up. Regardless of how comfortable or uncomfortable it is, you show up. That’s what love is supposed to mean. But she didn’t.

One night he asked me to call her, and he was upset with her for not coming back. My heart broke for him. He just wanted to see her one more time, to see her face before he left this world. That was the last thing he asked of me before slipping into the coma. She never came back.

So I sat by him, day after day. My sister Jennifer had been there a few times, but that was it.

That morning, crying, I whispered to him: Please, I love you, but you can’t hold on anymore. She’s not coming, and all you’re doing is torturing me. Please let go. You’ll see her again soon.

And I swear, the pulse slowly drifted out of his veins when I said those words. I looked up at the clock 9:03 he was gone. I stepped out, got the nurse.

I believe he was waiting for her. He wanted to see her face, to say goodbye. And when she didn’t come, he finally let go because I asked him to.

That moment has haunted me ever since. I feel extreme guilt for asking him to let go, as though my words were the reason he died. But deep down, I know the truth: he was already leaving. His body was tired. His love for her was strong enough to keep him here, but my love for him gave him permission to go.

That’s the kind of love he lived with. He gave everything he had for others for me, even for her children, things another man might not even do for his own, and didn’t. That’s why I can’t stand it when people speak badly about him. They will never understand the depth of what he gave.

My father was the kind of man who gave me unconditional love, and I don’t believe many people ever truly get that from their parents. I believe every person should have that from at least one. I was blessed to have it from him.

He was the glue of our family. People in my family respected him deeply. Even the ones who married into our family. I think they married us because of him. My sister’s husband, my own husband, wanted to be part of a family that he was the center of.

And when he died, it was as if the respect died with him. People started acting like fools even me. I didn’t care anymore. Or maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t care, but that I no longer had anyone whose opinion I valued enough to steady me. Without him, there was no one whose presence kept us all in line. My husband didn’t care. My sister’s husband didn’t care. Even my sister’s stepson drifted away. He never made any effort to come back, even after we had been such a close family. My father would be disappointed in him, deeply disappointed. I took care of his grandmother for over four years. I drove her to the doctor, to the grocery store, to get her haircut. I cleaned her house. I drove her over an hour away to lay flowers on his great grandad’s grave. I showed up for her when no one else did because that’s what family is supposed to do for each other. And it wasn’t my sister doing it. She wasn’t about to. It was her husband’s grandmother, her husband’s stepson, and they weren’t kin to me in any way not even by marriage. But I did it anyway, because that’s what family means. And where is that family now? Nowhere.

In the end, I didn’t even get a thank you. I didn’t even get invited to her funeral. That never would have happened if my father were alive.

After he passed, I found myself sitting in his office, while my husband tried to keep the business going. Working, still running it, but nothing felt the same.

What broke me most were the phone calls. I had to pick up the phone, over and over, and tell people my father had passed away. I don’t think anyone realizes how hard it was to say those words out loud, again and again. It’s still hard for me, even now.

But in those phone calls, I also learned things I never knew. People told me how he had stepped in when they had nothing. How he had paid their car notes, even their mortgages, just to keep them afloat. He never said a word about it, not to me, not to anyone. At first, I thought it was just one or two stories. But the calls kept coming, and I realized it wasn’t rare at all it was who he was.

I sat in his chair, with tears rolling down my face, hearing person after person tell me how he had saved them in ways they would never forget.

That was the kind of man my father was to me and now I knew he was that person to others as well. He came from nothing, and even after he made something for himself, he never clung to it. He wasn’t materialistic at all. To him, money was just paper, paper you used to take care of others. And that’s exactly what he did.

But I also know this: my father wasn’t perfect. One of my half brothers has told me stories of their childhood, of how my father left them when he was young. He remembers it as abandonment, remembers being told that the weight of the family was now on his shoulders. He told me once that our father put his hand on him and said, “Son, you’re the man of the house now.”

I’ve heard another side too. I’ve seen the proof, from my mom, the Navy records, the child support checks, the birthday cards that were sent back unopened. I know he did try in his way, even if they never saw it. I think the truth is somewhere in between: he was a young man who made mistakes, who loved deeply but sometimes wrongly, who grew up and became someone better later in life.

That’s the man I knew. The father who gave unconditional love, who poured himself into me, into my children, into his other grandchildren, into everyone who came to him for advice. People saw the best of him later, but I can’t deny that his beginning left scars.

And maybe that’s where our lives meet in the mistakes, and in the hope that they don’t turn into regrets. I just wish, toward the end of his life, his children would have given him more of a chance. And I pray that my own children and I come together in life, the way I wish he had with his other children before he died, and before I do.