About the Book
This is a preview edition of a touching novel told from the point of view of a young boy whose father contracts Cancer.
A beautiful blend of fairy tale and realism, this gentle book allows children to discover how to celebrate the life of a parent who is dying from a terminal illness, or who has recently passed over.
View Photographs
I have uploaded many of the photos that I took on walks, which are referenced in this book. You may view them for free, and buy inexpensive prints of them.
Synopsis
Davey and his sister Zoey find out that their father has Cancer. Within two months Daddy dies. Before he passes over, Davey and his dad take walks and go to museums. They take many photographs, which may be downloaded for free from a website.
Davey writes poetry to his father’s photographs and Zoey uses the photographs as models for finger color and water color paintings. In this way both children preserve memories of their dad and share the essence of their father with the world.
The walks, artwork and poetry (three of which were first published in critically acclaimed Mobius, the Poetry Magazine) empower Davey and his sister to develop an appreciation for nature that nourishes and provides spiritual sustenance as they mature.
Although it’s written primarily in prose, there are many poems, some of which have been previously published in critically-acclaimed Mobius, The Poetry Magazine. The poems and the photographs (a Snow Dog, rocks that look like a hippo and a labrador retriver, trees that reach up to Heaven, rushing streams, beautiful meadows, etc.) lend a dreamy feel to counterbalance the heaviness of death.
Before, during and after his father’s passing, Davey experiences a true sense of celebration, with rituals like balloons that go up to Heaven carrying drawings and poems by everyone at Davey’s father’s wake and celebratory chocolate cake.
It’s a wonderful book for children from 5 to 75, and can be used to help children celebrate the life of a grandparent, Aunt, Uncle, friend or pet. It needs to be read to young children. Older children will devour it independently.
If you join this site, and login you will be able to download the manuscript. You will also be able to take a quick on-line survey, which will impact upon the form of the final book.
If you have not joined, you will not see the download link or survey, but you will be able to read the beginning, below, or send us an request. Note: It may take two or three days to approve a manual request. Joining provides immediate access.
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Download the preview edition of Daddy Was Dying so We Went for Walks.
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Here’s the beginning . . .
Hello
My name is Davey. I’m seven, almost eight. I go to Evans Elementary. I have a little sister, Zoey. We call her ZZ for short. I have a dwarf hamster who runs in an exercise ball. I’m in second grade. I like to ride my bike, play hide-and-seek and watch cartoons. I’m probably just like you, except, maybe for one thing: My Daddy is dying.
The day that Daddy told me, I just finished watching “Bubble Trouble” on DVD. That’s where Wylie Coyote is chasing the Road Runner and a truck turns over and the coyote gets stuck in a bubble that looks a lot like a hamster ball. The Road Runner shows up. He starts chasing it; they run faster and faster. The Road Runner keeps saying , “Meep, Meep,”and the coyote starts to fall backwards, but he runs real hard and he makes it to the top of the cliff, but he’s going too fast and falls off the other side of the cliff, still a prisoner in his bubble. He bounces up real high and Wylie gets sucked into a jet engine before he falls to the ground and goes boom! Poor coyote.
Just as the cartoon ended, Daddy came in wearing his big backpack and said, “Mommy and Zoey are going over to Uncle Rick’s. Let’s walk over to the duck pond and have a picnic, just the two of us.”
A picnic sounded like fun. I clicked off the TV and we walked out of the house and turned left, just like we always do, but this time the sprinklers came on and we got wet. It felt good, and we laughed. Daddy pointed to one of the sprinklers and said, “Look, Davey, a little rainbow.”
I smiled. “A rainbow is one of God’s miracles,” I said.
He grinned. “Where’d you learn that,” he asked.
“From you.” His grin turned into a smile.
I told him what he had told me so many times, “Big miracles are hard to find, but little miracles are all around us,” and I added, “like rainbows that come from sprinklers.”`
Dad’s smile spread over his whole face. He tousled my hair. “What’s the best miracle of all?” he asked me.
“I am,” I said, remembering how many times he’d told me, “You and Zoey are my best miracles.”
“That’s right,” he said. “All life is a miracle, every blade of grass, every dog, every cat, every bird…”
“Every hamster,” I said, interrupting.
“Yes, every hamster,” he said, and he pointed to a dandelion. “What’s that?”
“A weed!” I hate weeds. They choke our lawn.
“Marco Polo likes to eat the dandelion greens,” he said. Marco Polo is my hamster. We named him that because he likes to explore. He runs all over in his hamster ball, sniffing and smelling. He’s a smart little guy. It didn’t take him long to lean how to make the ball take him where he wants to go. He balances on his back legs and puts his front legs on the ball where he wants to go and then keeps pushing on it until the ball turns. When we first put him into the hamster ball, he used to run into walls all of the time, but after a little while, he figured how when to stop pushing. I guess it’s a little like riding a tricycle, you get used to it.
We turned the corner and walked down Periwinkle Lane toward the duck pond, and Daddy said, “There’s an interesting thing about rainbows, they only last a little while, but I remember some of them for my whole life.” He pointed to the duck pond in the distance, “Race you to it.”
I didn’t answer. I just started running, and running. I ran hard and I beat him to the pond. When we got there, we were both out of breath, but happy. Dad opened his backpack and took out five small balloons attached to a black balloon weight, a blanket and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a Thermos bottle of milk and two plastic glasses. Three of the balloons were shaped like stars. Two were shaped like hearts. They were gold, silver, red, yellow and blue. Dad spread out the blanket, put the balloons and food on it, and we sat down to eat our lunch while we watched the ducks swim around the pond.
I still like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but not as much because in the middle of my fourth bite Daddy said, “Life is like a rainbow. Sometimes, it fades, and life is also like a dandelion. Sometimes it chokes other life.” He untied the balloons from the weight and he them gave them to me. “These have a special spirit,” he said, “let them loose, and tell me where they go.”
I let them loose, and they hung there for a little while, then they started to go up, slowly at first. The wind caught them and they started to go up faster, and faster, and after a minute I couldn’t see them anymore. I looked at Dad and said, “I don’t know. Up to Heaven I guess.”
Dad smiled and said, “Yes, that is where I would think they would go too. Davey, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just tell you. “I have something called Cancer and it is choking my body. In a little while my body is going to die. Then, my spirit is going to go up to Heaven, just like those balloons.”
A Strange Day
Everyday Miracles
Squiggles
Broad strokes
Trees
Slide onto the paper
Drawn by a finger
Connected to a heart.
David – Age 13
I woke up this morning to the sweet sound of Zoey giggling. I remember when she was a little baby, I’d blow a raspberry on her belly button, and she’d giggle. I’d get such a kick out her because her would face light up, and she’d break out in a big grin. I still love to watch her giggle. She bobs her head and her black hair bounces up and down. “She’s probably watching cartoons,” I said to myself, and I bounded out of bed to go in and join her watching the Smurfs or Big Bird or Oscar doing something silly.
Zoey’s room is right down the hall from my room, but on the other side of the house. Her door was half way open, and I saw her bent over something on the floor, and I was about to run in and ask what was so much fun, but I didn’t. When I got close to her door, I noticed she was finger painting with Dad. The two of them were scooping up paint on their fingers, and making big circles and small squares and having a good old time. Orange; she smeared orange, then green, then black. Zoey was making Dad smile and laugh, and all of a sudden I realized that I hadn’t laughed with Dad for a long time.
“It’s time to clean up, Zoey” said Dad. He picked up a wet towel and wiped her hands off. Then, he started cleaning off his hands, and putting away the pictures. Zoey, picked up a box of crayons. She picked up a piece of paper that she had scribbled on before. Mostly, it just had a gray background, but there was a small picture of a purple dog under a brown sun too, and a green ice cream cone. She picked up an orange crayon and a purple crayon and she drew a picture of herself with purple hair, and a long orange nose, and a big purple smile. She drew a purple hat on it too. Then she looked at Dad and drew this purple box, and put down the purple crayon and picture up a blue crayon and started blue drawing boxes over the purple in blue. She wrote “*DAD“ under the box and then “LOVE” to the right of it. Then, she picked up an orange crayon and drew a bubble—you know like the kind they have in comic books where the characters say or think something. She left the words out, but underneath it she wrote a “P.” She put down the orange and picked up a red crayon drew two hearts, one yellow and one red. They reminded me of the balloons Dad asked me to let go. I left before she finished the drawing. I just backed up and went back to my room. When I heard Mom coming down the hallway, I curled up on my bed like I was asleep. ZZ was making and Dad smile and laugh; that was something I couldn’t do, no matter how hard I tried. At least, not right then.
It’s the strangest thing, about the only thing I remember about the rest of that day is that I wanted to kill Marco Polo. When Mom and Dad and I picked him out in the pet store, they told me that he’d live about a year. “A year, that’s all, David,” Mom told me. “Wouldn’t you rather have a dog? They live a lot longer.”
“I want a hamster, and I want that one, he’s an explorer, like me,” that’s what I told them. I didn’t care that he would live only a year. I figured a year was a long time, and we’d do a lot together, and it wasn’t his fault that hamsters only lived a year. I figured we’d be friends for all of his life. On the other hand, my Dad is supposed to live a long time, at least until I graduate college, and Marco Polo, a lousy little hamster is going to live longer than my Dad. I wanted to pick up Marco Polo and squeeze all of the life out of him. But, I didn’t. I didn’t play much with him, but I didn’t hurt him, and I’m glad about that because now, when Daddy is gone, Marco Polo puts a smile on my face when he runs up and down my arm, and I smile when I think of Daddy saying, “He’s one of life’s miracles.”
The next day, June 14th—one week before the first day of summer, Daddy came home early and we had a family meeting. He told us, “I’m not working any more. I’m taking sick leave. I’m going to spend the time I have with the three people that I love most in this world; we all hugged him and kissed him. Then, Mom asked Zoey and me to go in the other room, and she talked to Dad alone, and when she came out, she said, “Zoey get your shoes on, we’re going shopping.” Mom and Zoey left, and Dad reached out his arms to me; I ran into them and I cried and he tousled my hair, and he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Nooooo! I screamed.” I shouldn’t have screamed at him. I saw in his face that I hurt his feelings, but I just couldn’t go for another walk.” He looked at me, and put his hand over his heart, like he was saying The Pledge of Allegiance, and he almost whispered, “I’ve already told you the worst thing possible, Davey. Everything else will be better.”
“Why a walk?” I asked.
“Because I want to see beautiful things, in the world, and in you.”
That didn’t really make sense to me, but I wanted to make him happy, so I put on my Nike All Stars, the red ones with the black trim and the long white checkmark that Dad helped me pick out, and when I came out he had packed up some sandwiches that Mom had made up and some juice and milk, and graham crackers. Meanwhile, I put some mixed nuts and cranraisins into a plastic bag.
“You’re gonna like this hike,” he said. Dad put on his Droid, and we left.” We drove out to Mount Rose Highway and started on the way up to Lake Tahoe. Neither one of us said anything for a long time. I was afraid that if I asked him anything, he’d say he was going to die tomorrow. He plugged his Droid into the car radio and we listened to music. We said nothing until one of his favorite songs came on, Peaceful Easy Feeling by the Eagles. It’s one of the songs we sing when we go to monthly folk sings, and Daddy started singing along. I sang along too, even though Daddy had on his crooked smile.
I remember feeling happy that we didn’t have to listen to any commercials. I thought we were going all the way up to Tahoe, but he turned off early, and we went towards a place called Dry Pond. “Why’re we going there?” I asked.
“Because for the first time in a long time, Dry Pond is filled with water, and I want to see it,” Dad said.
When we got there, there was a mountain in the distance called Slide Mountain. It was covered in snow. I thought that was cool, but Dry Creek was like any other pond. I didn’t think it was a big deal, just a bunch of trees and grass growing around it, and the ground was soggy and I didn’t want to get my sneakers wet. But, it made him happy to look at it, so I was happy too, and after a while, we had looked enough and started to hike.
While we were hiking, Dad would stop and he’d take a picture. Once he a picture of a rotting out tree stump, and he said, “What you do you see?”
“Nothing, just an old tree stump.”
A little while later, we passed an old rotting pine cone, and he looked at it for a while, and said, “I see a porcupine crawling,” and he took a picture, but it just looked like an old dirty, broken pine cone to me.
I started to relax because he didn’t say one word about dying. We stopped in front of an old log, and he had me take his picture with his foot on top of it, and then he took a picture of me. I climbed up on top of the log, like the King of the Mountain. He smiled; we walked on and we got to two nice rocks that were in the shade of three big trees, and we sat down, and we ate the ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches that Mom made on small hoagie rolls. They were really good, with lettuce and tomato and mustard and no onions. Dad likes onions, but I don’t think onions belong in sandwiches. No how, no way.
We walked for another ten minutes, and didn’t say much and we came to a part of the road that went up a steep hill, and it had a lot of twists and turns in it, and Dad took a picture. There was nothing special about it, and I asked Dad, “Why’d you take that picture?”
“It’s for my Road of Life series,” he said. I didn’t know what that meant, but I didn’t want to talk about life and death, so I kept quiet. About ten minutes later, we turned around, and we walked home, and I don’t know why, but when I got home, I took out Marco Polo, and played with him, and let him run up my hands and over my shoulder a few times. After a while, he went down my arm into his ball, and he went exploring.
Weird
It ran across the beige
into the pirate’s mouth
Down and out his sword
and stopped
Hole in two.
Where’s my light saber when I really need it?
David – Age 8
The next day we played miniature golf, and then we did something I didn’t like at all: we went to the funeral home that was going to bury Dad, and Dad showed Zoey and Mom and me the caskets. …
If you’d like to read this book as it evolves contact me by using the form below. Also, contact me to order a galley print or review copy (free to approved press), special interim edition (great for English teachers ) or place an advance order. Your investment is $12.95, plus shipping and handling. Request a PayPal link, or send a check to LB Creative, LLC Press, P.O. Box 40444, Reno, NV 89509, for $12.95 each book, plus $4.00 Shipping and Handling for the first book and $1 S/H for additional copies.
