My eyes snap open with the excitement only a purely innocent, carefree child can experience. All I can see out of my bedroom window from where my head lie on my pillow is the bare tree tops engulfed by the foggy November sky, so cold its bright white essence is nearly blinding to my unadjusted morning eyes.
I kick off the covers and leap to my feet in one fell swoop. I give the mattress two excited jumps before I hop to the ground and grab socks for my cold feet. I double check the calendar near my bedroom door… Yes! Just four more days, I’m so excit…wait… I hear voices. That’s odd, I’m usually one of the first to wake. Oh well, more people to share my countdown with!
I swing my bedroom door open and bound down the hallway when suddenly I’m hit with the unexpected, blunt force of a night train.
Somehow I just know.
I gather my bearings enough to understand the crying faces in my living room are all familiar, but the situation is foreign. Suddenly I realize I’m praying to a God I’ve never prayed to before. Begging is more accurate.
As I take role in my head for the third time desperate for Daddy to appear I see Mommy coming towards me. She swoops me up and sits me on the couch between her and my distraught brothers. I can see she’s trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear her words over my own desperate internal screaming. Please, please, please walk through the front door, Daddy. So everyone can stop crying and we can tell them it’s only four more days until my birthday.
“Daddy isn’t ever coming home again is he, Mommy?” I hear myself say. She shakes her head and all I can hear is my heart breaking.
On November 5, 1994 Joel C. Garrett II passed out at the wheel in the wee hours of the morning. Thinking he’d slept off a night of drinking with his boss. He left behind a wife and four children; three teenage boys and one baby girl.
As we all know, whether it be positive or negative, daddy’s have an influential role in every little girl’s life, especially daddy’s little girls. I was four days shy of my seventh birthday and instantly a lifetime short of a daddy. And, although, I only have a handful of memories with him, I can say with complete confidence he is a huge part of who I am today. Because, he instilled the value of hard work, the importance of loyalty, unconditional love. I spent the first seven years of my life feeling like the most beautiful, special girl in the entire world. He not only told me those thing, but showed me every day.
This was the first of many sledgehammer blows to my innocence yet to come.