My Father; Requiescat In Pace

Coy A. Huskey
January 10, 1921-August 13, 1990

I am posting the day before the anniversary of my fathers death. He passed August 13 of 1990, after a long illness of multiple causes. I was the one who had to make the decision to take him off life support, then tell my mother, home with cancer, that he was gone. I lost her 17 days later. Having no brothers or sisters, the time was overwhelming, and to this day I am not totally healed. I'm as good as I get. I think there are some things from which you never totally recover.
I do not remember him young, nor did I have photos of him from this time period for most of our life together. One of my Aunts was kind enough to send me an assortment of pictures of him as a youth, and a young man.

Had he been given the opportunity to attend university, I am sure he would have excelled. He was exceptionally sharp--brilliant, both with intelligence and an utterly dry, acerbic wit. (from whence mine comes!) There was nothing he could not fix, figure out, make, or make light of! Life was a never ending cornucopia of things to learn.

But it was the '40's, and the nation went to war, and he was called, serving his time in the Pacific Theater--New Guinea and Australia. What he saw, what he experienced, never left him but left permanent scars. He would speak of little of it later in life and though I wondered and would have liked to have shared the knowledge of the real facts of the time, I respected his choice to forget.

And like most service men of the era, he came home, was reassigned to a different station (Fort Knox, the Armored School as an Instructor), met a girl and married. Thus began the part of his life I knew.

A photo of my parents, young, happy....I still have the clock he is holding that was a gift from her. It had in it a bayberry candle. We would only light it during the holidays. The clock was an antique and he frequently had it apart, refurbishing all the tiny pieces, some so small he used a magnifying glass and tweezers to handle them.

Father couldn't ski at all, but he was a complete ham as is his progeny.....

.....this is a much more realistic shot of the day in the Alps, when they were stationed in Vicenza, Italy, where I was born.
Looking back at these photos in bittersweet tears, I realize how very short life is, captured in a few pieces of celluloid, tattered paper and emulsion, fading away and most of what you know is in your heart. You slowly allow the bad to pass and what is left is the stellar portions of the people you loved the most.

May you always have someone you love to walk with, to talk with, to make the most of your days with.
I bid you peace.
I bid you joy.
And a long and loving life.
May it be so.