Father's Day

My father, Everett G. Sibole, passed away, Dec.11, 1984 so I didn't get to call him or visit him this past Sunday but that didn't keep me from thinking of him. My father was typical in many ways, 5'11" tall, 195 lbs. a blue collar worker and teamster member The only thing perhaps you might notice if you knew him long enough was that he never went out of the house without a hat on. If there was an underlying reason for that he never shared it with us.

So what does an ordinary man leave to a son for a remembrance on Father's Day? Two things I remember vividly. He was a man that like gadgets. He passed away before the real technology boom but I remember him getting a reel-to-reel tape machine when they first came out. Then when cassette tape players came on the scene, he had to have one. I mentioned he was teamster, when CB radios came out he had to have one of them for his truck and  one for the car, so he could "10-4 good buddy" with the rest of the truckers. Had he lived just a few years longer I'm sure he would have had an eight-track player, cd player, mp3 player, cell phone and I'm sure I would have been emailing him when PC's and the internet arrived. I can't picture him into video games though, he was too serious for that.

The other remembrance was one that means the world to me and it happened on his death bed. My father, even though he was a Christian man, a born again believer, was afraid of dying as long as I can remember. Dying was something he thought about frequently and it terrified him. I never did understand it because I knew Christians were not suppose to fear death because we don't really die, we just pass from this life into another, more glorious one. Even though he knew that, the thought of dying still haunted him. The last two weeks of his life, he was bed ridden and on medication so strong that he hallucinated. There was a nurse that came and took care of him for 8 hours a day and then my mom and I sat with him the rest of the day and night. Then a little more than 24 hours before he passed at 2 a.m. he awoke and ask to talk to my mom who was in bed. She was getting so physically worn out that I hated to disturb her rest. I had some things to tend to while he was awake and I told him if he stayed awake until I tended to those things I would wake her and let him talk to her. To my surprise, he did stay awake. So I kept my word, knowing he didn't have long to live, I didn't want it on my conscience that I had denied him the opportunity to talk to her. I got a kitchen chair and sat it beside the bed then went and got her. He had been so heavily medicated that he had not carried on a meaningful conversation in several weeks. But he talked to her that morning with a clear mind for one solid hour. I was amazed. At the end of that hour he told her, in a calm, clear, fearless voice, "I'm leaving, I don't want to go but I'll meet you over there." He then went back to sleep and never awoke again before his passing almost 27 hours later. For a man that had feared death for so long to be that calm and fearless when it came to the actual time of passing left me with a remembrance not only of his life but of an assurance that I too will be able to meet him again.