Happy Birthday Dear Old Dad!

Layton Wendle Eagar, July 29, 1951-June 20, 2009

Today is my Dad's birthday. Even though he is not here for me to say it to him it still needed to be said.

Happy Birthday Dad, I love you.

My brother Max spoke beautifully at his funeral. His thoughts and his sentiment have become mine today.

"When we left the eternal reams of our heavenly parents to come to earth, we brought with us a longing to return to live in their presence. God placed that same yearning between parent and child with us in our earthly families. I have always had a yearning to be with my dad. That yearning was intensified during periods of my life when circumstances made it difficult to be with him. Now that he has passed to the other side that yearning has again been intensified as it has been extended beyond the bounds of this mortal existence."

I know that this is the way that it is, the nature of mortality, the way it has to be. Still the little girl inside wishes differently. She has a hard time reconciling what is, with what she wants, or what might have been.

When my dad was twenty one he was involved in a terrible motorcycle accident that should have taken his life. The lasting affects of that accident limited his capacities compromised his health though out his life in many ways. Ultimately the repercussions of that accident took his life. Part of me wants to curse what was, for the sake of what might have been. The other part of me knows that were it not for that accident I may not be.

My mom was a nursing student working in the hospital where he was taken after the accident. In a way that accident was the beginning of me. My mom said that she had seen him around the small college town that they lived in but she didn't really know him. Would she would have met him would they have fallen into love then marriage were it not for the accident?

Though they were only married for seven years I am inseparably connected to him and to her and the two wonderful families they each come from.

I love and miss him today. I have hope that I will see him again that he is somewhere still, his same big hearted self. Without the constraints of this sometimes cursed but ultimately blessed mortal frame. He is the musician, the inventor, the athlete, the thinker and more. All equal now again to his heart.

Perhaps I will someday fully see and understand all the threads of providence and destiny that run through mortal life and I will no longer lament and ask why and just say of course with a grateful heart.

For now I will just say Happy Birthday Dear Old Dad, with love and longing in my heart.

~your daughter Dovie.