Dreams have the ability to make you smile as soon as you wake up. Alternatively, they also have the power to completely destroy you, once you realize it wasn’t real. I lost my dad almost 30 years ago. Not a day has gone by where I didn’t wish it was all a misunderstanding.
Lately, my dreams have told me it was. A misunderstanding, that is. Several times now, I’ve woken up and gone about my day, not remembering what I dreamed of, until later. At some point during my day, the realization hits me.

My dad is still dead.

For a moment, my mind allowed me to believe he wasn’t. Something in my brain says, it’s okay, you can tell your dad about this moment later. Then I realize, no, I can’t and I haven’t been able to for quite some time.

I can’t tell you why this is happening to me recently, but I know I wish it would stop.

My dad missed everything big that’s happened in my life. The birth of my children, my graduation from college, and finally meeting the right man. But he’s also missed the little things. The things I find myself thinking, “I’ll call Dad later and tell him this story, he’ll think it’s great.”
It’s normal to think of someone you love, who you’ve lost. Grief knows no set timetable. How a certain person’s death affects us is not something we can know, until it happens. We know to lose someone we love will be devastating, sure, but not the extent of it until it’s occurred.
For years, I tried to ignore my grief. I fell into bad behaviors in what I can only describe as an attempt to bring back some kind of feeling I was missing. Unconditional love and support I lost when I lost the most important man in my life.

Let me tell you, those things aren’t found in random people, simply because they pay attention to you.

We can’t go back, only forward. No matter what I think would be different in my life, if my dad hadn’t died, I’ll never truly know. I’ve lived with his loss for so long, I thought I had accepted it.

But my dreams think otherwise.

Maybe it’s the season. He died in April and his birthday is in August, but this time of year brings up memories galore. My dad wasn’t a huge fan of Christmas, but he made sure we celebrated because it made us happy. There aren’t a lot of Christmas memories I can bring up from my childhood, but the two that stick in my mind the most involve him going to the ends of the earth for us to be able to celebrate in a manner he thought befit us.
That may be the crux of the matter at heart.

This year, we are struggling as a family more than we ever have. My husband and I both have worked hard in an attempt to make the holiday memorable for the kids we’ll have at home. We don’t get to spend the night of Christmas Eve or Christmas Day with his daughter, so we’re improvising.

She still believes in Santa, so we worked out a deal where she’s writing a letter to let him know she’ll be at our house, Christmas Eve Eve. Our son is not quite three, so he has no concept of the calendar. Luckily, because of my participation in a product testing program earlier in the year, we have gifts for the kids without having to scrape together money we just don’t have.

The gifts aren’t important; the memories are. And no one wants to remember a Christmas without electricity. Our kids will never know what we’ve experienced. All they’ll see is a warm home, snacks for our traditional movie, and thoughtful gifts.

My dad never let us know just how difficult life was for him, but I can see it now. As an adult and especially a parent, I have learned just how much you’re willing to sacrifice in order to make things right for your children.

My dreams may be lying to me, but I believe I’ve learned the lesson they’re sending. Life is hard, but we do what we need to in order to survive. And somewhere along the way, we learn to thrive.