My Dad Plays Center in My Heartđź’”
In 2012, my dad, William Okey, who grew up on a farm in Monmouth, Illinois, passed away from liver cancer in his house in Huntington Beach, CA. He was 79 years old.
A giant piece of my heart immediately went into cold storage. I was in shock. I felt so numb and dumb that I hadn’t even fathomed his death before hand; not able to wrap my mind around something so foreign. How could this person I loved so much not be here any longer?
My grief expressed itself: drinking too much, feeling stuck, depressed and crying over pictures of him.
I know I’m lucky I was with him for one of his last weeks here. I didn’t say goodbye like I imagined I would. I thanked him for his unconditional love. And told him how much I loved him. I had so much more to say.
One friend told me on the phone, “When your parents pass away, it’s like you’ve lost the defensive front line in your life and now you’re on the front line.” Another friend dropped off a sympathy card and wrote, “We will never forget our parents…it’s where we came from.”
My dad was in the army; stationed in New York and my parents lived on the base. My mom confessed to me in the 1980s as she criticized me for smoking clove cigarettes, that she and dad smoked cigarettes for “one year in NYC because all the other housewives on the base were doing it.” She also remembered going to see a doctor in the mid 1950s while pregnant with my older brother Mark, and the doctor sat behind his desk smoking as they talked about prenatal care.
My sister Jan came next and soon after, my dad was transferred to San Diego, CA, where I was born at Sharp Memorial hospital. When I was four, we moved north and landed in Huntington Beach when there were still orange groves, oil derricks and fields of lettuce and strawberries. We rented a house near the HB pier before we could afford to buy something in a new neighborhood that was replacing the lettuce fields. I remember my mom handing me my baby brother Brian, as I sat in the shag carpeted living room, being careful not to drop him after he arrived brand new from the hospital.
My dad went to UC Berkeley in San Francisco, finally getting out of the midwest thanks to a generous aunt. Midway through, he found himself on academic probation when his grades took a back seat to his role as Social Director at his fraternity. Years later, my dad finished his MBA at Long Beach State; studying at night while raising a family. My parents married when they were 21 and I was born when my parents were 28 years old, the third of four children.
Bill was a registered Republican. The old school kind who “voted for the man not the party” he told me once in a conversation. On November 8th, 1960, he voted for John F. Kennedy who beat Richard Nixon by a narrow margin. He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, a president who on his second day in office, pardoned all the Vietnam War draft evaders. I remember him saying that “President Carter was a good man but he was in a position that was way above his head.” My dad voted for Ronald Reagan, who in 1980, defeated the incumbent president Jimmy Carter. My dad felt a certain kinship towards Reagan, a Hollywood western star, who was raised poor in a small town in northern Illinois.
My dad was a Human Resources Director in southern California when aerospace companies were coming in hot. He worked at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, a company that was a major US producer of jet fighters, commercial aircraft (DC-3) and space vehicles. They were bought by the Boeing Company in 1996. In 1932, the firm began its DC (Douglas Commercial) series with the DC-1 prototype. In 1935, the DC-3 took off as the world’s first successful commercial airliner. During World War II, the DC-3 was converted to military use as the C-47, and this plane became the most widely used transport aircraft of the war.
One of his last jobs was managing a large group of engineers at the Hitachi Company in Irvine, CA. He was a hugger and I loved that he shared his warmth with his Asian-American coworkers that maybe weren’t used to being hugged by a 6'4" man. He planned potlucks to keep up employee morale. He loved corny jokes. He was pro-union but had his reservations about them.
When my dad was in high school, the basketball coach asked him to join the team as a Center. My dad told him that he wasn’t coordinated enough to play basketball and he didn’t know all the rules. The coach said something like, “Well, we need you to stand there and swat the ball away from the other team every time you can.” So he did. My dad’s love of basketball was a lifelong affair. He followed the Los Angeles Lakers religiously, along with the Golden State Warriors, the LA Clippers and the UCLA Bruins. He also loved baseball. I went to many LA Dodgers games in the 70s with my dad and saved all their baseball cards.
It’s the letting go while holding on that is the hardest. I now have most of my heart back and I thank God that my dad is still front and center ❤️
