by Celia Hales
I had never seen my dad in a red flannel shirt. I was used to white shirts with ties. But there he was in my seventh grade classroom, setting up a space heater against the bitter cold of a winter day.
You know how 12-year-old children are.
“Is that your daddy?” a classmate asked.
I thought there was surprise in her voice.
“Yes,” I replied. “But I have never seen him look like that before!”
I was embarrassed by his casual appearance, embarrassed as only a 12-year-old, poised on the brink of adolescence, can be.
I never told him, but I think my mother did. She would have heard about it when she picked me up from school. I can imagine how it went.
“Where did Daddy get that awful red shirt?” I would have whined. “It looked terrible.”
“He has had it,” she would have said. “He got it out because it was so cold.”
That would not have satisfied me. I wasn’t ready to claim him as my father before my classmates, looking so different from usual.
Fast forward 35 years. My dad suffered a ruptured aortic artery. He survived surgery, but that type of rupture carries only a ten percent survival rate. My husband Paul and I flew to his bedside. We shared intimate moments
I remember saying one day, “I love you, Daddy.”
I remember that he replied, “Yes, I do know that.”
Then they put him on a respirator, and he couldn’t talk to us anymore.
We got through the funeral, which featured one of my dad’s last requests, a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” I stayed in my hometown with my mother for two weeks, to help her get on her feet. Then I returned to my work out-of-state.
About two weeks after my return to work, I retreated after lunch to the cot room, which was a part of the staff lounge. I was exhausted from the five weeks of my father’s ordeal and the additional two with my mother. I drifted off to sleep.
I remember hearing the door to the cot room swing open. I slit my eyes to let in some light.
There, kneeling beside my cot, was my dad, wearing a red plaid shirt. He was smiling, a familiar, loving smile.
I wondered, still barely awake, “Why is he wearing that shirt?”
Then I smiled to myself as I thought, “So I can recognize him.”
I drifted back to sleep.
The memory of my dad’s appearance to me a month after his death has stayed with me all these 18 years since.
Why did he appear? I didn’t know then. Now I think I do. I think he wanted me to know that he would always be near.
He didn’t hold it against me that I had been embarrassed as a child by his shirt. He would have found it amusing at the time, just as I do many years later. It is a private joke between us.
He has never reappeared. I do dream of him from time to time, and my dreams tell me that he is looking out for my mother also.
It is reassuring to believe that my red-shirted dad has become one of my guardian angels.
