Tied in Knots by Greg Willits

Author:Greg Willits
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Published: 2017-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The Gift of Identity

“In fact, there are many knots that I cannot untie.”

— Dwight Schrute, The Office

Some might say my father-in-law, Hector, had questionable judgment, because when I asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, my only employment was playing guitar and singing (badly) for latte and tips in a coffeehouse. I didn’t have a job and certainly not much of a future, yet he gave me his blessing to marry his daughter. But when he did, he looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “I trust you to take care of my daughter.”

In June 2015, Hector started not doing so well. Over the previous few years he had dealt with multiple health problems, but now he had developed lung issues that the doctors struggled to diagnose and treat. “Well, you have bronchitis,” they said at first. Then, a few days later, it was, “No, it’s not bronchitis, you have pneumonia.” Finally, with devastating clarity, they announced: “It’s not pneumonia. It’s cancer, and it’s all in your lungs.”

They at first assured us that he could still be around for quite some time, but just four days later, as we scrambled getting kids out the door during their first week of school, we received one of those terrible phone calls that almost takes the air out of the room and makes it feel as if the world just stopped turning. The doctors said very matter-of-factly that my wife needed to get on a plane right away because Hector only had twenty-four to forty-eight hours to live.

We rushed to pull the kids out of school, pack the van, and drop Jennifer off at the airport. Within three hours of that phone call I began the 1,400-mile drive back to Georgia with our five kids, hoping we’d get there in time. Around two in the morning, I ran out of steam and finally stopped at a hotel for the night. As the children and I were stumbling toward the elevator in the hotel lobby, I received a text from my wife.

“He’s gone,” she wrote.

She had arrived hours before, told Hector she loved him, and held her father’s hand as he died.

At the funeral people got up and talked about Hector and what a great husband he was, and what a great father he was, and what a great grandfather he was. As I sat listening, I kept thinking: “No one knows there was more to him than that. No one is talking about what a great father-in-law Hector was.”

No one knew of the inside jokes Hector and I shared. No one knew of the secret side glances we gave each other when our wives were talking, or that we signed emails to each other SIL and FIL (for son-in-law and father-in-law). No one knew that the only Spanish words I ever said to my Puerto Rican father-in-law were when I asked him if he wanted a cerveza, to which he’d usually answer, “Sí, sí.”

At his funeral, I was able to stand

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