“It’s Too Late When We Die.”(Words from the song, The Liv...

“It’s Too Late When We Die.”
(Words from the song, The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics)

I stretched out my trembling hand to wake him from deep sleep. I grasp his bony biceps and felt mush where powerful muscles once tightened the tissue. I swallowed and gathered strength to speak.
“Dad, I have to go now. I love you.”
His eyes never opened and in a whisper he said. “I love you too, David.”
Those were the last words my dad ever said to me. It was at the Veterans’ Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. I returned to my home in Florida and to the life I made for myself as a physical therapist.
Ten days later I was flying back to Iowa to say good-bye to his body. He was in his mid fifties and dead from cancer. I stood before his casket and thanked him for his words of love spoken days before.
For that was only the second time he ever said he loved me. Each of those times occurred after he beat the demons of alcoholism. I never would have thought years prior that such a kind heart lived in the chest of the man who pulverized me from age eight until age seventeen.
I was whipped with both ends of a belt, kicked with steel-toed work boots, slapped, punched and pinched on what seemed like a regular occurrence. I was once locked away in a darkened, hot stairwell that connected our cellar to the backyard above. I was in that tomb for some sixteen hours with no food or water. I had only spiders and cockroaches to keep me company in the pitch blackness. That was the day I lost my childhood. I was eight-years old.
Dad quit drinking years later, his personality changed, his persona changed and his wicked heart was filled with love. Then he became sick. There was so much I wanted to say. There were so many things I wanted the two of us to do together. But, he became sick. I never told him how proud I was of him. I never told him he was one of my heroes. I regret that. 
He appealed to the better angels and they listened. Both of us listened and we became friends. But then he became ill.
I am now decades older than that day when I stood next to him in the hospital when we shared our hearts and our love. I say to you, the reader, speak your heart now, because, “It’s too late when we die.”
My book, “The Shade Tree Choir” tells my story of physical and emotional child abuse.  All of my books speak to this topic is some fashion.
www.davidnelsonauthor.com
Listen to the song about a boy and his father.
https://youtu.be/uGDA0Hecw1k