Be My Eyes

Submitted By: Susie, Alaska

There has never been a greater love affair between a father and his little girl than my own. With age, I’ve learned that it transcends not only time and geographic distance but death as well. We still journey together, every single time I climb, closer to my Maker and in rich company with my Dad.

My wilderness dreams began at bedtime. As a young girl, my father tucked me in nightly. I snuggled deep into my down covers, smiling in anticipation of his tales. He spoke of adventures under the starlit skies of the West in a bivvy sac, of portages through major gales and across wicked terrain, even of Sputnik traversing the endless skies of New Mexico from high in the Sandias. I raced to that bed every night to enter this magical world with my father. 

Sadly, the real world dealt him a much different hand. Genetic heart disease limited his adventurous spirit to the confines of his uncooperative body, but it never limited his memories or imagination. I believe he escaped those shackles with me every night in those stories, and I? …I began to dream of adventures that would shape the rest of my life.

As a teenager, he solidified my love of the West by encouraging me to attend a summer excursion to the Sangre de Cristos, a majestic, pristine, untouched wilderness in the Rockies. With his health continuing to fail him, he took my face in his hands, looked into my wild eyes, and he sparkled as he whispered, “Be my eyes, punkin.”

I spent that night under my first big sky without a single streetlight obstructing its splendor. I breathed in the dry, crisp, pine-infused mountain air. I looked out into the wild, wooded expanse, and I knew the West was my home. It was my dad’s home. It was where we both belonged, and someday, it’s where I would stay.

I transitioned into young adulthood at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, fulfilling that promise to be my father’s eyes through those formative years. He endured several heart surgeries and cardiac events while I was his eyes, filling his soul with my tales of adventure.

Just two months shy of my graduation, I received the last call. Dad had endured two cardiac arrests, and it was time for me to come home. 

At the funeral home amidst the details of putting a loved one to rest, I ran desperately out of the building, the fog of grief and exhaustion engulfing me. It was a bitter cold, rainy March morning in Maine. The Nor’easter hadn’t passed in five long days.  My head hung.  My sullen tears ran faster than the raindrops fell.  I wailed pent-up tears into the wind but soon felt the comfort of my mom’s arms from behind.  She lifted my chin to the sky.  The tiniest ray of light broke through a pinhole in the clouds. She reminded me that he is at peace.  A big fat black raven sat in a tree nearby cawing loudly at our antics below as if on cue. I noticed it that day but certainly wasn’t drawn to it then.

The raven visited me many times since then, often in the unlikeliest of places…on a trip to Yosemite (one of our favorite places), where he obstinately cawed on the hood of my car. In the middle of a desert when I desperately missed him. Recently, he visited again when I needed him most.

In April of last year, I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer.  In the course of diagnosis, I was forced into a pet scan. I lay motionless, bound by a rubber shackle at my feet and by a blanket wrapped around my midsection, pinning my hands hard between my legs. 

Look–I don’t panic. Ever. But as I rolled into that hot box, I felt as if I entered a coffin. My mind raced haphazardly. “I have cancer!  Do I have one lesion, or has it invaded my entire body?”  My breath escalated and heart pounded as I struggled to regain control.

I closed my eyes. Immediately, I was on the ridge line between Mount Baldy and Blacktail, pleading for my father, the raven, to lift me on his wings.  He came.  I felt the cool wind on my face and through my hair. I looked down at the bareness of treeline, immaculately meeting the carpet of pine. I saw flecks and ribbons of bright green, families of aspens dancing intermittently amongst the pines. I felt the vastness of the big, blue, Western sky. It was now HIS turn, to break MY binds and to be MY eyes.   My breathing slowed…my heartbeat surrendered.   We still journey, my Dad and I, together, on mountain trails, in the wilderness with great abandon, and in my darkest hours.

Today, I adventure, Because. I. Can.  Because I must!  For a thousand reasons I climb.  To be my father’s eyes. To give thanks.  To do hard things.  To bring hope.  To pay it forward. I am an ordinary person, but have been given the precious gift of life.  I don’t truly know for how long, but today and all remaining days, I. Choose. Joy.  I choose to see the light, thanks in large part to my father’s steady presence, his unwavering love ever by my side.