how to: say "good-bye"

Ingredients:
-1 eleven-year-old self-proclaimed ‘Daddy’s Girl.’
-1 forty-five-year-old workaholic.
-1 brain tumor.

Step one: raise daughter to idolize everything her father does. When asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she should respond, “Just like my dad. Or an artist.”

Step two: grow inoperable brain tumor between the two hemispheres of her father’s brain.

Step three: after seven months of fighting and treatment, take father to Heaven on a bright and sunny, Sunday morning in February.

Step four: pilgrimage to southwest Michigan to bury father, keeping daughter out of school for at least three weeks. Have daughter stand next to the hole in the ground where father’s casket has been placed.

Step five: back to Pennsylvania where daughter must try to continue her life without one of the single, most important people in her life.

Step six: have daughter attend counseling—“to help her with the grieving process.” Counselor should have the personality of a rock and say nothing but, “Mmmhmm,” and “And how did that make you feel?” Result should leave daughter angrier and worse off than before.

Step seven: daughter should spend next six years obsessing over grades to graduate in the top fifteen students of her class. She is summa cum laude and should stand on the stage in front of her peers as her name is read allowed, and look up into the rafters of the room, and say, “I did it, Dad. That’s for you.”

Step eight: move to Michigan, twenty minutes down the road from where her father is buried, and send daughter to college nine hours away. Have her “visit” her father with flowers for his grave whenever she is home.

Step nine: after Christmas in the ninth year since he’s been gone, send the daughter back to college, but on her way, have her stop to say, “good-bye” to her dad and ask him for a safe trip back to school.

Step ten: the daughter must stand above her father’s grave for half an hour sobbing in the sideways yellow light of eight am on a cold December morning the same way she did nine years ago when he died. Every time she looks at his name and realize that she shares it she will sob harder. Her tears will freeze to her cheeks, but it won’t stop her. She’ll cry until she’s got nothing left and realizes that she’s got a nine-hour drive ahead of her. She’ll turn around wipe the tears from her cheeks and get in her car to leave.

Step eleven: as she drives away the daughter will wave out the car window and whisper, “See ya, Dad,” into the wind.