Real Life Movie

You ever have real life feel like a movie? I have. It just happened to me this weekend. I just traveled home to Louisiana to attend my father’s funeral. I headed to East Texas to meet my brother and his family so that we could make the trip home together. There is something so somber about bringing a family together for an event like that. It also brings to the forefront exactly how rare it is to get the whole family together. As I stood in the funeral home, looking around the room at all the family scattered about I could not help but feel sad. I know my dad would have loved to have us all together as a family for a number of other occasions.

A friend asked me if I had regrets… if I felt like there was something I wish I would have done or said before this happened. At first, with the exception of just getting to simply say goodbye, I didn’t think there was. But as I spent two days talking to the hundreds (literally… almost 300 people attended his funeral) of people who came to pay their respects to him and his family, I found so many things I regretted. There were so many sides of my father I didn’t know. The things I did know… how everyone knew him as a joker, how he was very humble, how he never met a stranger and how he had a genuinely kind heart… those were no surprise. What was a surprise was how one of his fellow managers from Lowe’s told me how he had this unique ability to calm down the most angry of customers and have them leave the store happy and a returning customer… an ability I have always had and had no idea where I got it from. The same manager also told me how he could talk to every person at their level, regardless if they were a master electrician or a housewife who had never been in Lowe’s before. He was patient and helpful and never made anyone feel dumb for asking a question… another ability that I have been told I have and really didn’t know where it came from. I heard stories from fellow members of this church about how their grandchildren were so sad to hear about his death. How they all knew him and loved him and cared so much for him. So I guess I feel regret that I have only seen him with my “child blinders” on. How I never looked outside of my previous known experiences with him to get to know him as a man, not just a dad.

I guess if I have to die, I can only hope that I will have touched the lives of so many people. Lowe’s corporate office literally sent in employees from other stores to cover his location so that every single employee could attend his services. There were Lowe’s customers who showed up. There were people he had known for one year and people he had known for 40 years. Being his child, I (as were all my siblings) was constantly approached to be told stories of my father and to be reminded just how much of a loss it was.

It was a grueling two days for everyone and at the end of the second day, as I sat around with some of my family and we talked about my dad and we picked on my sister and we did all the normal things that families do, that overwhelming feeling of being on a TV movie washed over me again. The family begins its path to move forward, life must go on… Fade to black… Roll credits.