During the ordinary course of days, we encounter countless situations which impact how our life will proceed on any given day. Less frequently we face obstacles or opportunities that can impact the course of several days or even several weeks but such changes don’t often result in a dramatic redirection of our lives. There are days, however, when a single event can change everything and the arc of life spins off in a new, sudden, unexpected, and unknown direction in a previously inconceivable way.
October 25, 1966 was such a day. I went to sleep the night before an 11-year-old boy part of a family of four, counting my father, my mother, and my sister. When I woke early morning on the 25th, long before dawn, I heard the voices of my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. I knew immediately, with a now familiar sense of dread, something was catastrophically wrong. I got out of bed and went into the living room where, with my eyes blinking before adjusting to bright lights, I learned my 31-year-old father had died of a heart attack.
Nothing would ever be the same for any of us. My father was highly educated in a brand-new field then called Special Education and he held a management position with the Great Falls school district. The course of my entire life from the day of my birth up to the day he died was influenced by his pursuit of advanced education and the advancement of his career. We have always considered the job in Great Falls to just be the beginning of a long career and we have speculated he would have many other offers to move into other opportunities. Who knows what might have come after Great Falls? A federal job in Washington? A bigger school district out of state somewhere? A teaching job in a college or university? All of those possibilities slammed out of existence in a blink.
We were suddenly bereft of our leader and needed to begin our lives again. And we did. 50 years have passed and on my older son’s next birthday he will be the same age as my father was when he died. There have been many times when I paused to consider what might have been but as the years drifted by, the images of unrealized futures have darkened against the light of what came to pass for each of us. What is left is just a powerful, yet undefined, sense of what was lost or gained in a single moment just after midnight on October 25, 1966.
The most powerful impact I can articulate is that his absence from our lives has defined each of us, my mother, my sister, and I, just as radically as if he had lived beyond that day. I have learned to no longer ask how God could have allowed such a thing to happen but instead to ask what we should learn from the experience. 50 years later we are still learning because virtually every day brings a reminder of a past that is certain and a future that was changed forever.
Today I no longer fear and grieve at his absence as much as I have learned to be open his to his presence in all of the little ways that construct his legacy. When the 25th slides in while we are sleeping tonight, however, it will be appropriate to pause and remember and to consider what might have been. Other tomorrows will come soon enough.
