I'm Trying

It was one year ago this very morning that my dad died. He died right here in our house. The house we shared with him. He died surrounded by family, some of the people who loved him the most. It still hurts. There is not a day that has gone by that I haven't thought about him. Missed him. Wished with everything in me that he was still here. I never expected his death to be so brutally hard. It was. It is. Oh well.

The morning my dad died, I wrote. I'm sure this seemed and still seems odd to some people, that my father dies so I run to the laptop to blog about it. That wouldn't come anywhere near the truth, though. The truth is, I wrote about it because I was near meltdown. The kind of meltdown that felt like it would last forever and I might never find my way back to sanity. The kind of meltdown that screams, "Somebody do something before I die too!" So I did what I have always done since I was a kid when I hit imminent implosion. I wrote. This is my post from that morning.




My father died this morning. As I type these words, I choose to not believe them and yet they remain the truth. This has been a surreal day. One minute I am crying hysterically as I stand in my dad’s closet trying to hide my pain among his things. An hour later I am laughing like a fool as I tell my sisters we are going to have a difficult time finding someone to adopt three middle aged orphans. I am pretty sure my condition is close to what a normal person would call psychotic today. The truth is, I am broken.



Love is patient ~



Thank you, Dad, for loving me when I was unlovable, which was more often than I wish were true. Even when I rejected you, you never turned your back on me. You waited patiently for God to change my icy heart and He did.



Love is kind ~

Thank you, Dad, for teaching me what it means to be kind. Not the fake kind but the real deal kind. The kind that loves other people even when they don’t look like you, think like you or smell like you. The kind that remembers to treat others better than they might think they deserve and really mean it.


Love is not rude ~


Thank you, Dad, for showing me how to negotiate my way through this world without being a bully.


Love is not easily angered ~


Thank you, Dad, for being the cool head of reason more often than not throughout my life. You made the worst situations seem so much easier to walk through because you kept your cool, which always helped to calm the hot-head in me.


Love keeps no records of wrongs ~


Thank you, Dad, for forgiving me …. over and over and over again.


Love always protects ~


…. for saving me from myself so many times.


Love always trusts ~


…. for trusting me when I didn’t deserve it.


Love always hopes ~


…. For believing I would do great things someday.


Love never fails ~


…. For never failing to love me.


I'm not quite sure how I am going to face this life without you but I know God is not done with me yet. I love you ~ Marla


So here I am, one year later. I'm still not sure how to face life without him but I'm trying.

Charles F. Casas, my dad