Two Years…

Me & Daddy at his 70th birthday party!

I can’t believe it has been two years since I said goodbye to you, Daddy.  Feels like yesterday.  Feels like a lifetime ago.  I miss you.  You were a voracious reader so you would be excited to know I joined a book club!  A new experience for me.  I read my first book this month.  You would have loved it.  It was beautifully written with lots of midwestern, small town references.  The woman in the book left her family for college and then the bright lights of the big city.  It might have reminded you of me a little.  Leaving home to go pursue my dreams…minus the horrible, abusive mother and father in the story.  🙂

Those last few months of your life, I couldn’t send you books fast enough!  You kept flying through them.  You were always ready for more stories, more information, more experiences, more adventures.   You and mom stopped traveling by the time I came around but you kept going around the world and lived in practically every time period through those books.  You spent time with swashbucklers, cowboys, knights, kings, presidents, paupers.  Lori told me two days before I arrived that you had said it was getting harder to stay focused on the words.  Getting harder to read your beloved books.  That was 48 hours before you were about to die.

Shortly after you passed away, I was sitting next to you at your bedside.  No one was in the room, it was just us. You were gone but you were still there.  Your energy all around me, on my skin, in my lungs, pumping through my veins.  That’s when I saw them.  Your weathered reading glasses sitting on the nightstand.  I never told anyone in my family this but I slipped them in my pocket.  They sit on my nightstand now.

Daddy’s reading glasses on my nightstand.  Tim gave me the card they sit on top of.

Kelli Joan Bennett is a filmmaker, actress, writer, entrepreneur, advocate for creative thinking and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Think Outside The Box Inside The Box Media.

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