A long time ago, I wrote on my list of \u201c100 Things To Do Before I Die\u201d that I wanted to visit my dad\u2019s grave before I went off to college.<\/p>\n
When I was about 10 years old, I flew by myself to Hawaii to visit extended family.<\/p>\n
One day we took a trip to Pearl Harbor, and as I got on the boat I passed by someone who I\u2019ll never forget. This complete stranger, completely unaware, looked exactly like my dad \u2013 preserved in his youth of the photos in my house. As a 10 year old, I completely believed for that summer that, somehow, my dad was alive and this man was him and somehow he\u2019d stayed young all this time living another life all these 10 years \u2013 with complete loss of me or my mom or anyone else.<\/p>\n
But, of course, it wasn\u2019t him.<\/p>\n
The realization of this impossible scenario, filled me with a kind of sadness I hadn\u2019t felt until that moment. As a kid, part of me imagined that he\u2019d someday come back, and I just had to be a good kid for my mom and wait patiently with her. It wasn\u2019t until that day on the boat that I really, fully understood my situation. My dad passed away when I was 2 \u00bd months old; there\u2019s only one photo of him holding me \u2013 because he was always the photographer. A lot of my artistic traits come from him. He knew how to sew, draw, he loved photography, and he was really great at fixing hair. I grew up being told that he was a kindhearted, gentle soul who hardly ever got mad.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s painful losing someone you know and love, but I think people also forget how it feels to lose someone you wanted to know the most, but didn\u2019t get the chance. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always felt my dad watching over me and keeping me safe, but there\u2019ll always be the pain in my chest. Realizing he couldn\u2019t congratulate me for graduating high school, and realizing I\u2019ll never know if I\u2019m making him proud or happy. And I don\u2019t really know who\u2019s going to walk me down the aisle when I get married \u2013 but I know that my dad will still be with me, even if I can\u2019t see him.<\/p>\n
I was hoping the sun would shine today for him again, like it did last year, but the beauty of the sky is that it\u2019s always shining \u2013 we just can\u2019t always see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long time ago, I wrote on my list of \u201c100 Things To Do Before I Die\u201d that I wanted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-texts-on-my-phone"],"yoast_head":"\n