I Am Grateful For My Dad’s Death

I am grateful for my Dad’s death on Christmas Day 1963. Before you get too worked up about what I said — I’m grateful, not happy about it. The two — gratitude and happiness — often work together but they are not the same.

That’s my dad’s photo above in Charlotte, NC, circa 1939. This was before he suffered a heat stroke in the swamps of Louisiana, preparing for deployment to the Pacific Theater in World War II.

His physical and mental health was never the same after that. This was before I was born. So, I never personally knew that healthy, courageous, compassionate, truly happy man. But I met him later.

It was 1963. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November that year. We silently watched the TV coverage in my sixth-grade classroom. Thanksgiving was hard, coming days after such a horror.

My dad died on Christmas Day, a little more than a month after the president was killed. He had just celebrated his 46th birthday. I was 11.

At the funeral, people came up to me to tell me stories about my dad. Stories I had never heard. A picture of who he really was started to emerge.

My uncle told me about my dad wading into a fight — this would have been in the 1930s in North Carolina — to help two teens who were being bullied and beaten by several others. The…