The Accidental Shoplifter

I’d always take Adrianna grocery shopping with me, and when she was little of course she'd sit in the cart on that little seat provided for just such situations, facing me, her little legs dangling, her eyes darting everywhere taking everything in while her hands tried to grab everything within reach as I maneuvered through the aisles.

I’d have to pay attention and try to situate the cart so she couldn’t actually reach anything, but she was a determined young girl. If I tarried too long looking at nutritional labels and cost per ounce signage as I tried to decide on which can of condensed soup to purchase, she’d stretch as far as she could to reach a jar of brightly colored of this or that, and if that meant she had to stand up in the cart seat to do so, so be it.

I had to be ever-vigilant, and when I’d stop her from grabbing a huge jar of deviled eggs or something she’d pout and scowl and squabble at me in anger and frustration. She didn’t’ go quietly; she didn’t appreciate being thwarted in her endeavors to touch and grab and hold the entirely of the grocery store in her sticky little fingers.

She was skillful, and moreover if she ever was able to successfully nab her quarry, she did not allow it to be released back into the wild without a fight. Her hands would become iron vises with a strength and fortitude greatly out of proportion to her diminutive size.

There was often a huge endcap full of large brightly—colored inflated balls apparently staged and displayed just to frustrate parents with children like mine. I’d try to move quickly past them while distracting Adri, but she of course became adept at grabbing one of these from the dispenser, anyway.

Often when this happened I’d just give up for a bit and make the best of it, knowing that if I let her hold that ball during the remainder of our grocery shopping the rest of the jars and cans and bottles would be safe. The ball would sate her; she’d hold it and talk to it and ignore that jar of deviled eggs sitting so tantalizingly close to her pudgy little hands, and I’d return the ball to its display right before we checked out.

Problem solved.

But sometimes she’d grab the ball and I wouldn’t even notice. I would be too busy checking the expiration date of a jar of artichokes or something and not even notice the spoils of her hunt.

One day, after we’d checked out, paid for the groceries, and made our way to the car to unload, I noticed she was still clutching one the large balls in her hand. She was maybe 18 months old, but I swear there was an expression on her face that can only be described as smugness.

“Ha ha, daddy. Look what I got,” she seemed to be saying.

The groceries were already in the trunk, she (and the ball) were all that remained. I made a half-hearted effort to take the ball away from her and return it to the store but was met with iron vices and a pair of lungs that could scream to alert all of North Austin.

I gave up and gave in, but told myself that I’d pay for a ball the next time we went shopping.

I have no idea if I did or not. But my intentions were good.

Fourth of July at Lake Geneva: A Celebration

As Cindy says, Adrianna was well-loved, and her ashes were divided amongst many of those who loved her. Her mom took the majority back to Louisville, and I had several pieces of jewelry made as well: a necklace for Stephen, a couple of beads and a heart necklace for each of the boys, and a ring for me along with wooden heart that contains some as well.

But I wanted to scatter some of her ashes at one of her favorite places, the beach in Fontana, Wisconsin on Lake Geneva where together we spent so many summers of the Fourth of July when she was younger. 

Cindy and I both got the idea independently to do so this year, so we arranged a quick trip up there with lodging at The Abbey with plans to scatter her ashes at the beach at sunrise on the morning of July 4th and then watch the annual fireworks that night over that same beach.

It was rainy and overcast most of the weekend we were up there, but that morning at 5:20am it was clear and calm. I took off my shoes and walked a couple of feet into the lake, my feet on the sandy bottom as gentle waves lapped up onto the beach as they’ve done for millennia. 

Just as the sun officially peaked up from the horizon I scattered Adri’s ashes into the amazingly clear water and gently stirred as she became part of the lake forever. It was an emotional moment, solemn and peacefully satisfying. My gaze shifted from the life-giving water slowly upward to take in the sky at sunrise, the birth of a new day. Life continues.

Before we headed back to the Abbey I filled several little 5 ml bottles, some with the sand from the beach, some with the water from the lake that had just accepted Adrianna into its being, keepsakes for me and hopefully one day for the boys.

Later that evening, at the traditional start time of dark-thirty, the fireworks began. Our vantagepoint from an outside patio at The Abbey was perfect as we watched the fireworks over Fontana beach, a night and place and moment Adri and I shared over many years during her lifetime. 

I got extremely emotional and started to cry and it verged on becoming an ugly cry, but it wasn’t just because of sadness or despair but also an exhilarating release of a sort of weight off my soul knowing that Adrianna was now forever a part of it all. 

The grand finale, with all its brightly colored hues that punctuated the night sky with a myriad of reds and greens and blues and golds that gently fell to the beach, was accompanied by a majestic symphony of sounds: the booms and crackles and whistles of the fireworks themselves along with the excited “oohs” and “aahs” and applause from the gathered crowd with the honking horns from all the boats on the lake mixed in for good measure. 

It was magnificent, and I didn’t want it to end. A perfect allegory and representation of Adrianna’s too-short life.

The Journal

I'm very disappointed and ashamed of the behavior of some people as of late, and I'm having a real hard time not letting it eat away at me. I'm trying every coping skill and mechanism I can muster but am having a hard time letting it go. Probably because I've been forced to let so much go the last year or so already. I'm trying the copying mechanism of last resort now: oversharing here.

When Adri was really little and was first moved out of state, I was told to start keeping a diary of sorts where I'd talk to her and tell her my thoughts and perceptions and to keep it until she was 18 or so, at which point she could read the thoughts and feelings I was having at the time, seeing perhaps another version of what she may have thought reality to be.

I would mail or ship her stuff that would never be given to her, for example, so I should write "today I mailed you a book about horses" or whatever, so she'd eventually know.

Or I would write that "I wish I could talk to you every day on the phone, but I get hung up on unless it's on Wednesday nights only." In other words tell her all that I was trying to do as I was trying to do it, so maybe, when she was older, some sort of deprogramming could take place.

For her fourth birthday, for example, she had a party at her grandparents' house in Louisville. She kept expecting me to show up. Every time she heard a car she'd get excited and look, but it would never be me. No one bothered to tell her that I couldn't come, that I couldn't see her until the following day.

That broke my heart, thinking of a little girl thinking that her dad had forgotten her birthday, so I decided I better start writing.

I did this for a while, but it was hard for me, because it would just make me angry again and it was a long wait until she was 18.

In the end, however, it didn't matter. It wasn't needed. Adri was intuitive and emotionally as well as intellectually advanced, and she always knew what was really going on. I was lucky in that way. She knew her mother, and she knew me, and she knew the truth that was probably somewhere in between and closer to me, and we became close. Definitely a daddy's girl who learned to cope and work around the issues she faced while not with me.

Without having to sludge through that journal of her dad's POV over the years at 18 years of age, she moved on her own so she and her newborn son could be near me, which was the most positive affirmation I've received in my life.

Maybe it was therapeutic to write in this journal none the less; who knows. But it's main purpose, thankfully, was never needed. Cindy even wrote several entries in the early years which was nice.

Maybe I need to do that again. This time, however, it will probably be needed. Whereas Adri always let me know she knew what I was going through and was aware of the intentional and unnecessary roadblocks erected to make our relationship difficult, my present situation sees no such awareness from the people involved. Quite the opposite.

And I fear that those who would benefit from reading any such journal or what have you will probably not care in five or six years, anyway. They'd simply refuse to engage. Hell, I'll be lucky to have addresses and phone numbers at some point.

Adri's own texts that I've compiled and printed out in book form would themselves probably go a long way in possibly enlightening some thoughts and ideas. She did a good job of capturing the thoughts and emotions, beliefs, moral clarity and priorities of the moment. How the boys thought, how she thought, her many, many proud moments along with few disappointments.

However, at this point, at least, they could care less. Texts showing the book and explaining what is contained within the covers go ignored. Maybe one day?

If they don't care to read what Adri wrote, they surely won't care to read what I've written, but I'll have a couple copies ready just in case.

Hopefully one day they will find their proper home with the proper people. And hopefully it won't be too late, before bad habits and bad relationships take root and become the norm. 

A Few Random Birthday Thoughts

 

My random birthday thoughts:

The first time I woke up this morning I looked at the clock and it was exactly 6:45am, the moment Adri was born 38 years ago.

From 1993 until 2006 I never got to see her on her birthday, always the day after on the 19th, since that's when her summer began with me.

She moved to be near me after Bryce was born in 2013, and after that I had 10 straight years where I got to see her on her actual birthday, the last being her final birthday in 2024.

In 2025 her birthday was the day of her memorial, by design of course. However, I'm not sure I made that clear to those who attended who might not have known that.

I had hoped that we could have her birthday going forward be a nice family event with her boys and everyone, but unfortunately as many predicted (including Adri herself) this may not be possible, at least until the boys are adults.
Her wind chime is active today, ringing out with laughter in response to the gentle breeze.

I always think about Paul McCartney and Heather Lea Hall Kunz on this day since they share this birthday with Adri.

I got a dozen roses to put in a vase today on the little table that has my remembrances of her. The flowers are beautiful, of course, but one of their thorns pricked my finger in the process of placement. Appropriate.

Time moves even faster than I ever imagined, even though I always dreaded and was aware of how fast time moved. Still, it ends up being even worse than that.

I hope she was able to grab and hold on to moments in her life that made it all grand. I know she did. I just hope they occurred more often than not.

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to my Adrianna.

Her 38th.I made this for her 30th birthday, when she was a bit down and a bit disappointed with where she was versus where she wanted to be.

I had planned on making a new one for her 40th, but instead I'll post this each year on her birthday, I guess, remembering a moment frozen in time forever.

I try really hard to accept and rejoice in the life she did have, the time she did have, the time her boys had, the time I had. To embrace that and celebrate that with no regrets or sadness.

But it's hard. But we all try.

Happy birthday to my Adrianna. I love you.

Songs

This past year there have been songs with seemingly no apparent connection to Adrianna, or at least no obvious association to her life or my life with her that I’m aware of consciously, that have none the less caused me to cry when I heard them.

I’m not talking about obvious songs that I have always directly associated with her, examples of which include my own songs, the entire Rent oeuvre, selections from Carousel, “Father & Son” by Cat Stevens, or “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder, to name just an extremely small sample of a much larger set.

No, I didn’t know these songs would do anything to me, but when I heard them suddenly I’m filled with sorrow and despair. I’m not sure if it’s the lyrics (though I think not; I’m not much of a lyric listener) or perhaps the progression of melody or chords, but it’s something.

The first one that had this effect was when Cindy was playing a trailer on YouTube for Interstellar, and for some reason the main theme just broke me into pieces and I had to ask her to turn it off. I still don’t know why. I thought long and hard about it, and of course the movie is basically the story of a father and daughter, of life and death. Maybe somehow that got locked into my brain and the music created the association that after my daughter’s death causes issues. Maybe, but this connection seems specious (at best.)

The newest song, however, doesn’t make any sense at all. I first noticed it about three months ago when I was watching some old rerun of some 80s sitcom on a station like MeTV or Antenna TV late one night and “The Hogan Family” started next. The theme song caused me to break down and cry, and since then whenever I even think of the theme song and hear it in my head, I have to fight back tears.

Why? I did watch this show in first runs when it started as “Valerie” before being renamed “Valerie’s Family” after Valerie Harper left because of a contract dispute, before finally settling on “The Hogan Family.” Interestingly, it is the only TV show to be a Neilson ratings hit under three different titles, but such interesting trivia is not why we’re hear today.

Now, some (most?) of you may not know and certainly not care that “The Hogan Family” as I’ll call it from here on out is, for some reason, set in Oak Park, IL, my home town. I have no idea why this is so. Maybe one of the writers is from there, maybe they threw a dart at a map. I have no idea. And it’s not like it’s actually shot in Oak Park. Even the opening montages over the years during the credits show images that are clearly not Oak Park… though in fairness, some of the shots could have been filmed in my village. So the setting can’t be it. Plus, Adri, furthermore, is not from there in any event.

Of course, it could remind me of my childhood, and the more optimistic time that represented for me, but many TV shows would do that, and I don’t cry, for example, when I hear the theme to “The Bob Newhart Show.”

It must be a combination of the melody and the lyrics. The song is called “Together Through The Years,” and of course I have always had a complicated relationship with Time and the passage thereof. And it does speak of togetherness through this passage of time:

Life is such a sweet insanity
The more you learn, the less you know
In the heart of every family
There's a love that starts by letting go

Step by step and day by day
Reaching out along the way
Hand in hand, we face our fears
Together through the years

We get closer, through happiness and tears
And in our hearts we share
The laughter and the sadness
A special kind of madness
Together through the years

Life is such a sweet insanity
It's nice to know your friends are near
In the heart of every family
There's a love that's waiting there for you
Through the years

The melody, furthermore, especially during the “we get closer” verse, seems to hit all my melancholy musical signposts and appears to have what I call “moles:” musical notes or resolution that breaks what is expected, often (but not always) in the form of an accidental in the melody line, but it can also occur in the rhythm or the chord progression.

One of the reasons that, to me, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by Lennon and McCartney is so catchy to me and so “yummy” for lack of a better word is that 7^th chord they play unexpectedly at the end of each verse. (That, along with Paul’s little five-note bass motif at the end of every other line, obviously.)

“Together Through the Years” doesn’t have anything so obvious (or yummy,) but still, I think the melody progression in that verse along with the theme of the lyrics and perhaps also smattered with a bit of Oak Park nostalgia is the culprit here. But this also seems specious.

Who knows what other nondescript song will trigger me. I’ll keep everyone updated.

Missing

Sometimes now I can think about Adri without crying. Not always, but sometimes. Progress of a sort, I guess.

I really haven't had time to actually miss her, which I know many will find hard to believe. I have been so engulfed by regret and anger and despondency and sorrow that I haven't as yet been subjected to the vanilla-ordinary missing of someone that one experiences when there is a longer than average timeframe between seeing and interacting.

I've had bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

Of course, some of the sorrow has come from missing her this last year, but really and truly so much of my pain was from the tragedy of her life arc that I just haven't had the time or luxury (or curse) to allow myself to simply miss her presence, her face, her voice, her texts and her calls.

I've been trapped in a bubble of "why" and "how" which has provided at least a bit of insulation (which some might uncharitably categorize as "denial"), but if the extreme sorrow and soul-crushing is beginning to soften a bit day to day, it is now being replaced with the simple reality of missing her, full stop.

This is what we call progress, I guess.

Fourth of July

Fontana beach at Lake Geneva, 1996

 

One of her favorite places, we'd spend a week or two up there over the Fourth of July every summer and most of the daylight hours would be at the beach.

Cindy and I are going up there this year over the 4th to scatter some of her ashes so she will always be there on the 4th, under the fireworks, at her happy place.

One Year

Today it’s been one year.

It’s been both the longest and shortest year of my life. I’ve tried to make it through her loss in part by writing these things that I post, and this is the 80th iteration if you can believe that. Eighty little missives that I’ve written to both try to keep her alive and to keep me alive, all metaphorically of course.

One year ago Bryce began calling me at 6am but I didn’t see it then because my phone is silenced until 8am each morning. But when I finally looked at my phone that morning there were over a dozen missed calls from him and a single voice message that said, “Grandpa, please call, it’s happened again.”

By that time it was too late. Despite the best efforts of the EMTs and the emergency room attendants, Adrianna died at 7am, and with her a large part of my world.

I decided I wanted to be awake this time, to sit and contemplate where we all are now and what transpired, so I set a silent alarm on my watch for 6am this morning and quietly got up so as to not disturb Cindy. I went and sat on the stairs that are the center point of our open floor plan first floor and quieted my mind, tried to let peace flow over me.

The sun didn’t officially rise until about 20 minutes later, but of course in the dawn the house was still filled with that scattered indirect light that illuminated with a soft and gentle warmth that didn’t intrude on my thoughts. I tried to keep those thoughts to a minimum in any event.

We have a dusk-to-dawn automatic light outside our back door that lights up the patio, and it struggles with the transition from light to dark at both dawn and dusk. It flickers, turning on and off in succession as it tries to guess its proper state.

From my vantagepoint on the stairs I could see the light illuminated when I first sat down at 6, but around 6:40 it started to flicker on and off. Quickly at first like eight-notes, off and on, like a ship at sea trying to signal the shore. Then the flickering slowed to quarter notes, then pulses became less consistent, the rhythm of the flickers becoming more erratic.

It was then that I saw the flickering light for what it really was: a heartbeat. The light had started strong, then began to flicker, becoming more erratic and slower until finally, around 7, it extinguished completely.

The light had gone out.

Cindy gave me a gift this morning: a personalized wind chime that I’ve just hung from our patio pergola. It’s beautiful and makes beautiful music and is a perfect salve for today. I look forward to its song in the coming years and will imagine it’s my daughter speaking to me. I think I’m allowed that.

There’s so much I could say today, so much that still needs to be released from my brain, so many more feelings and thoughts and memories and anecdotes to share. So much more regret and sorrow, but also so much more joy, but for now, as my last official discourse and commentary for Year One, I’ll leave it at that.

Except for this:

Thank you to everyone who has helped me through this year, I think it would have been so much worse without you. Thanks to all that reached out directly, but I know that’s hard to do and if you didn’t, I understand (I’d have had a hard time doing so, too, if the shoe was on the other foot, which I hope it never is.) Just knowing these are being read, and that people who didn’t know Adrianna at all or well perhaps know her a bit better helps me so, so much.  I want to name everyone I can, but fear I will accidently leave out a name, so I’ll take the lead of smart award show winners who don’t even try.

Thank you.

The Last Time I Saw Her

Today marks a year since I last saw Adri. She needed to get her car inspected and she still wasn’t comfortable driving, so she asked if I wanted to come over and spend time with the boys while she and Stephen got the car inspected. Of course I jumped at the opportunity.

The boys and I went to the rec center and shot hoops and lifted weights for a couple of hours. When I checked in with Adri for a status update, she said that they were almost done, that it passed (not always a given,) and that they were on their way home.

When she originally called that morning she also sheepishly asked if she could have another little “advance” of $130 of her school money, since they needed a new battery for her car and were tapped out for the rest of the month.

She had asked for a little money in February as well, and when she did then it disappointed and frustrated me, and I let her know it. Harangued her a bit. Told her that they both were adults and needed to get their act together. Basically, just tossed the money on the counter when I left without even saying good bye.

This time I didn’t say anything about the money request, because I felt bad about being so hard on her the last time. Life is too short I literally thought to myself, just let it go.

When they got back from the car errand and the boys and I returned from the rec center Adri and I sat and talked a bit. We talked politics, lamenting a certain leader and policy decisions being made. “I can’t wait for this to be over,” she said, and I agreed.

I got up to leave and handed her the money with no judgement this time. She whispered “thank you” without looking at it. We said our goodbyes and hugged. I can’t remember if I said “I love you.”

When I got home, I saw that she’d texted me a longer thank you to which I replied “I love you.” This ended up being the last thing she ever heard from me, our last communication.

She died less than 40 hours later.

I’m so thankful for that last hug, and so thankful that I wasn’t a jerk about the money that last time, and grateful that the last thing I said to her was “I love you.” 

Life is too short, but I didn’t realize just how short it really was.