I Don't Have to Hang My Head Over Things I Wish I'd Said

Category: Personal

If you've noticed, I haven't been the busiest beaver on this blog in the past year or so.  There's a reason:  my dad's health began taking the inevitable downward spiral that those in their late 80s face.  

Today (2/9) that downward spiral ended at about 2 AM, peacefully in a southern Indiana nursing home.  (Ironically, he was scheduled to be released later today.)  He had so many issues, from dementia to renal failure to congestive heart failure, that it would be difficult for me as a layperson to guess a cause of death.

Samuel Raizor gave me more than an unusual last name and a big brother whom I still admire with that kid sister hero-worship mentality.  Born in the early part of the Depression, in 1930, my dad grew up knowing hard work.  As a child, I remember taking trips to his dad's and brother's farms to hang tobacco (this is Kentucky, remember), quite the laborious chore.  As I came along he put up chain link fences as his primary job.  He was also in the Kentucky National Guard.

What I have firmly engrained in my DNA from my father is a love of country music.  And I mean country music.  If you notice on the bi-monthly list of birthdays and death dates, there's hardly a newer mainstream country act listed.  That's because my dad would have told you that their music, in the words of Bob at the Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers, "ain't no Hank Williams song!"  And I heartily concur.

Dad got to see all the big acts who came through Louisville in the 40s and 50s, when they'd play at the old Armory.  He saw a raw Faron Young, he told me once, and said he knew almost immediately that Faron would become big.  

Our relationship, admittedly, was -- as the Facebook status says -- complicated.  Certainly it wasn't anything on the order of what the great songwriter Rodney Crowell detailed in his book Chinaberry Sidewalks, but we had our moments.  Fences were broken and the bridges were burned more than once in our lives, and yet love and time allowed new bridges and new fences.  Despite the fact that we had "issues" (and it's a rare person in this world who doesn't have them with one or both parents at one point in their lives), I can sit here today and thank God that I never feared some of the horrible things that fathers do to their children (daughters especially) these days.

I also thank God that we did have the opportunities to mend those fences and rebuild those bridges.  As Crowell wrote in "Things I Wish I'd Said," the touching song about his father's death:

And I thank my lucky stars
We had a chance to heal our scars
Now I don't have to hang my head
Over things I wish I'd said.

Samuel Raizor was 87.