Two Hours to Heaven
My dad promised he'd let us know when he made it. He kept his word.
Yesterday marked twelve years since my dad took his last breath.
Every Fourth of July weekend, underneath the fireworks and the flags and the smell of somebody’s grill, there is this other thing humming for me. July 2nd. The day we lost him. For a long time that date felt like a bruise on the calendar. But that’s not really the case anymore.
First, I want you to meet him.
Stan the Man
My dad was 6’4” with dark hair, full lips, and a mustache that came and went with the decades. He had dark brown eyes that twinkled. That is the only word for it. They twinkled. People called him Stan the Man, and it fit, because he had that thing you can’t teach. He would move into a room with total ease and the room would tilt toward him. People wanted to be near him. And when you were in his presence, you felt lucky. Chosen, even. You had all of his light shining directly onto you.
My parents divorced when I was two, and for a lot of my childhood (my earliest years) there were 50 miles between his house and my mom’s. This was long before cell phones, before texting, before any of the ways we stay tethered now. So my time with him was limited, and it was cherished. When I was with him, my whole world lit up. When I was away from him, there was a gap I could feel in my body.
He had a saying: eat your dessert first. That was his whole philosophy in four words. Don’t put off life. Don’t postpone the good times. Life is fleeting, so be here for it. And he lived it. He loved a cigar. He loved an expensive tequila. He loved baseball, he would sometimes make it to the Masters, and he loved pleasure, simple things, in all its forms without apology. I think that’s the real reason people wanted to be near him. He didn’t worry. He wasn’t stressed. He had this cool, calm confidence, a man who knew his place in the world and that was magnetic. He was athletic, handsome, and just so damn good to be around. A real man, in the truest sense.
He played the banjo. He loved bluegrass and John Prine. He hunted, he fished, he kept squirrel feeders and bird feeders and knew his regulars by sight. He always had a dog at his side. For many years it was Roscoe, his best friend who traveled with him for every adventure. In his final days it was Oodles, a dog he walked daily and was completely devoted to. He was at one with nature in a way I didn’t understand as a young woman because I was moving too fast. Building a career. Traveling the world. Raising babies. I remember, over the years, that he would occasionally joke that all he really wanted was to live in a cabin in the woods.
Even his work was the land. Real estate was his life. He ran Sadler Real Estate in Martinsville, Indiana with his wife, and while the other agents worked the residential listings, I remember my dad always wanted the land. He would go out on foot and walk it, moving through Morgan County the way he moved through everything, unhurried and paying attention, discovering the untouched and undiscovered corners of the place where he was born and raised.
I never really asked him about any of it at length. I wish I had asked more questions.
Two calls
When it all began to end, I was in Kenya.
There were two phone calls on that trip.
It was my first time in Africa, traveling through the countryside with my mom. At some point I called my dad, and somewhere in that conversation we discussed how he had never made it there. He would have loved it. The vast, wide-open spaces. The majesty of it all. Land that felt alive under your feet. The wildlife. I remember trying to detail every single thing I was witness to there, wanting to share the exhilaration of the safari, the magic of the landscape, and the sounds I could hear while sleeping under the stars in my tent.
He was dreaming of a cabin in the woods back home while I stood in the wildest country I had ever seen. I was starting to understand that I was walking around inside his language.
The second call came on day eleven or twelve, and it was my brother. It was time. If I could get home, I needed to do it fast. My mom and I hired a puddle jumper to get me back to Nairobi, and from there I flew alone across the world to Indianapolis, then made my way home to Martinsville, the small town where we’re from.
I made it. After years of watching lung cancer slowly take him, I got days with him. Actually, on those days, he was in his home with my siblings as other family members would come and go. He sat in his famous chair in the main room, the weakest I had ever seen him. What I remember, at least my memory, is that there was no fear in his eyes. No anger. But instead, there seemed to be some delight. Appreciation for his loved ones gathered close.
On the morning of July 2nd, my siblings were awake early as he passed. I came downstairs a few moments later. I’ll hold the most private details of that morning close, but I can tell you I felt two things at once: devastation, and relief that he was finally free of the pain. We sat together in silence, five kids and his wife, trying to adjust to a world that no longer had him in it.
Or so we thought.
