Where am I or Where I am

It has been years since I have written here. I have written posts in my head - so many posts.

Sometimes I didn’t write because I didn’t want to offend someone I was going out with or had gone out with. Not sure why I was concerned - anyone who knows me well knows about this blog and knows I write to help myself.

Sometimes I didn’t write because I just didn’t make the time.

Sometimes it was because I thought no one would care. That goes against my reason for writing here - self care and self preservation.

So I’m back, and not sure where to start. I think the last time I wrote was during Covid. It’s now 2024. Since then, I have dated at least one wrong person and gone out with many more wrong people. I secured a full-time job (finally) in local news and have laid to rest my remaining sailboat and my father.

I’ll start with the end of my hope for healing a sailboat. How’s that? Start simple.

The second sailboat had to be putdown, similar to the first one, though the first one was bug infested. This one - the Sunfish - was waterlogged and falling apart. Mom really wanted it off her jet-ski lift - it was an eyesore and I never had time to take her out. Correction, I never had time to learn how to take her out. Maybe I cursed the boat I never properly christened her or gave her a name.

Maybe I just failed. It’s ok. If you don’t try, what’s the point? Not just try to sail, try anything you’re interested in. It’s how my whole family thinks.

The end of the Sunfish was in the spring this year. Dad died in the fall of 2022. Dad died. Dad.

Dad, my hero, my biggest cheerleader. All of my siblings felt this way. Because he was.

Everyone who met my dad - from friends to business partners, neighbors to strangers - felt his energy, optimism, matter-of-factness and above all, his desire - his calling - to help and lift up others. He wasn’t always joyful and jolly - we would learn about the darkness underneath later - but he was thoughtful, well-read, highly intelligent, sometimes impatient and definitely stubborn (all the Fosters have these two traits). His smile was infectious. His giggle heartfelt.

When Dad said he was disappointed in you, it made you cry - no matter if you were 10 or 50. When he said he was proud of you, you knew his heart was happy for you and about you. You knew he knew you worked hard to get to that point - because he told you.

I didn’t get to live with my dad my whole life. He and my biological mother got divorced when I was 3. Chelle was 6 or 7; Shane was 2 and Bob was a baby. I was the only one to live with our mother, and soon a stepfather. I moved in with the rest of my siblings plus two more (yay!) with my dad and stepmom (who later became adopted mom - a story for another day) when I was 14 - in February 1984.

Our mother had skipped town with her lover, leaving me to tell my stepfather, and unfortunately, be alone with him for another week or two (also a story for another day). Wasn’t she a gem?

Dad and Cathy (from now on to be known as Mom) plugged me into the family as if I had always been there everyday since they married in 1975. They brought us all up to be independent, sell sufficient, free thinkers. Dad told us each that were “leaders, not followers” and told us that came with responsibilities.

We were never babied, though we were always allowed to feel our feels, and express them. We always knew we were loved - even if sometimes we weren’t liked. What a crushing blow it was when were told “I don’t like you right now.” Brutal. It ssually provoked tears and deep soul searching.

Dad believed in fun, even though he and Mom both worked a lot and worked hard. We spent our summer weekends water skiing and camping. We spent at least one evening each week in the summer playing softball with the neighbors in our big front yard in the country. Dad rode motorcycles, and later - that hard work paid off and he bought the cars he didn’t buy sooner because money was tight for decades and we needed to be fed and clothed.

He and Mom bought a vacation home in Florida. I started visiting, seeing them more often than I did for most of my adult life because I had moved away from Kentucky for my career. I eventually bought in Florida too and moved here full time - partially for my health and partially to be closer to them the six months out of the year they lived here. I figured I could be helpful as they aged.

I can’t express how happy I am to have had nine years living two miles from them - watching University of Kentucky football and basketball games with them, celebrating our birthdays together all those years, boating together, watching sunsets, toasting paradise.

I still can’t believe that’s over with Dad.

Dad had been sick or injured and in pain almost since he and Mom first had Covid in December 2020. He had to have spinal surgery and had blocked arteries. In 2022, he fell into mental illness - perhaps caused by the multiple times under anesthesia at 74 years old, perhaps it had been hiding for many years and was made worse by aging, surgeries and physical deterioration.

Dad always believed men had to be strong always - a trait of his generation; that mental illness was a symptom for the weak - and women. He learned the hard way that mental illness can affect anyone. He said as much when he was having a bad day that year. He put up a good front after months of him not being able to leave the house in Kentucky, of being confused about where he was or what was real and what wasn’t. He made everyone believe he was improving, healing and was fine.

I wasn’t even told everything until after. Dad didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. He was embarrassed. Dad could always out work, out hustle any problem.

No one will ever know what my father was thinking on Nov. 16, 2022, when he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It wasn’t him. Or if it was, he couldn’t live with who he was now.

It’s hard. Hard to come to terms with the mental anguish a man so strong, my hero, must have been tackling and perhaps finally deciding it wasn’t going to get better and that he was a burden, or going to become one. I don’t know. Hard to miss talking to him every week. Hard to know he’s not just up the street.

I look at his picture daily. I look at pictures on my wall of the two of us. I say hello to him, and I try to make him proud. If you don’t try, you never know. I’ll keep trying.

I love you, Dad. Always.