My 7-year-old was up all night puking. It made me think of my dad.
When I puked as a kid, my dad would hold my hair out of my face and press a cold washcloth over my forehead. I remember feeling so miserable, and so loved.
As I sat on the bathroom floor at 3:30 this morning, rubbing a miserable little boy’s back as he dry heaved into the toilet, I was thinking about Dad.
He died on March 30, almost exactly two years ago. We laughed when my brother-in-law imagined Dad’s relief at not dying on April Fool’s Day. “Only a fool would die on April Fool’s Day,” my brother-in-law joked in my dad’s gravelly voice.
As I held my son last night, Dad felt very close. His last words to me, a couple of days before he died, were, “I love you so much.”
He would have understood why I was thinking about him as my son was sick all night long.
