Lost Father

A couple of weeks ago as I was driving home from work in the evening "Dance with my father" by Luther Vandross came on the radio and I turned it up to full blast. It transported me back to our wedding in Samoa on the 17th of December 2005. As the sun was setting and the party was still going, my eight year old niece Yvonne stood up on the platform to sing this very song for me. It was her favourite song at the time and she had learned the whole song but was too nervous to sing alone so she did like a duet with Luther Vandross. It was a beautiful moment and I'm sure many tears were shed during that very song. Anyway I looked across and saw my brother in-law Yvonne's dad wiping his own tears.
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I wasn't very familiar with the song before then and as I was driving home I heard every word and I just started crying. It was so weird I just cried and cried while the song was playing partly because it reminded me that the song is about a little girl reminiscing about dancing with her father... and it hit me how ironic that it was sung at my wedding when I didn't even have a father to dance with me. Or maybe that the song was fitting because I would have loved to have danced with my father again if only at my wedding.
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I only just thought about this in the car that day because growing up I never felt I needed a father as I was so little when my father died that I didn't really know the difference. Though later on Mom told us that I was the most affected by my father's death as it was a critical time in my life when he passed. I had just started school and I remember him dropping us off to school and picking us up. I remember bits where he would lift me up and swing me around saying I was a big girl as I had started school. I also remember a little ballerina figurine he gave me because I had finished a school term. Another very vivid memory of him in my head is him walking around the guest house, hands behind his back with a Mozart LP blasting from the record player as he hummed, lost in the music. Due to this attention I got with the starting of school Mom said I lost interest in school after he passed! I remember being tutored at home because I missed too many days of school. Thanks to Mom for that!!
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Its healthy to cry as it is a natural thing and I always feel better afterwards. Funny enough I laughed at myself when the song finished as I felt a bit silly to have burst into tears like that. Anyway laugh like no one is watching and cry like the whole world is watching... or something like that.
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I love my father for I wouldn't be here without him and he left us with a lovely big family. For the fact that he was Mom's true love and that no man could measure up to him in my mother's eyes...Or did she just have enough. The moral of my story is I guess most of my siblings share this... The truth is: I would never really know what having a father is like.
But one thing I know for sure: I have one of the best mothers in the whole world.