Growing up without a father in the 90’s seemed to be a household trend. I soon learned that a two-parent household achieved far greater success for parenting. I’m not writing this as woe is me. I’m writing this to say I broke the mold. After the death of my father in the mid-eighties. I was about 4 years old.
I was often told it was a cold day. Somewhere between six and eight in the evening. Walking home from work. Three blocks away from where we lived at 5501 Litchfield St.
I imagine this ending again and again in my head. There he was 6’3. A warm and gentle face always smiling. A slightly bushy beard. Always the life of the party.
On the street, people knew his name. You needed something and he’d give you the shirt right out his back. (I was told)
Anyhow, as night approached. My father’s killer came out of nowhere. Maybe it was planned. Maybe it was a religious sacrifice. Or just pure evil. Being stabbed to death. The blade entered his heart. His attacker swiftly fled from the screen. My father crawled home.
He made it up the stairs. Falling on his mother’s Hammond B organ. My grandmother holding her son in her arms. The first responders rushed him to Mercy Hospital. Three minutes away from our home
We waited…
In the end, the news came. The doctors took desperate measures to save him. However, a minor mistake was made. As they tried to stop the bleeding the Surgeon on call nicked an artery and my father bled out on the table.
Thirty-five years later I tell my children this same story. Why, because they ask where is your dad? For a while, I avoided sharing this. I thought my husband and I could handle parenting without this sad background of my childhood.
Then my aha- moment came when I said. I have nothing to hide and this did not define me. Yes, mother struggled to raise three kids alone. I watched the nights she wept for her husband and the insurmountable task of raising three children without a father.
Yes, we flopped from house to house. Yes, it hurt, not being able to go to the daughter-father school dance. I missed a man I would never get to know.
Therefore writing of him has become the memoir I share beyond the grave.
Braking the mold, I went to college, went on to graduate school. I choose to see my life as a positive. One that I am learning to be open and vulnerable. Therefore I can heal and be made whole.~your kindness sister Krissy Mosley©2018
(photo by Aunt Carla Simmons my father and my mother holding me)
Krissy Mosley Ministries 