The Godless and The Fatherless.

As a little girl, my father was the center of my world. He was the peacemaker. The liaison between me and all the scary things of the world. Aside from the last year of my life with my father, I remember only the good things about him. I have deified him.

Admittedly, the deification happened when he was still part of my everyday life. I always put Daddy on a pedestal for all to see. Which is part of why I lost my handle on God when I lost my own father.

I was born-and-raised in the LDS faith. For all its faults, of which there are many, my childhood memories of the Church are positive ones. I was the little girl who brought my scriptures to church, sang all the words to the songs in Primary (the LDS church's sunday school program for children aged 3-11, which has its own songbook of "hymns" about Jesus, faith, love, and the beauty of the world in which we live), and even invited the other girls in my neighborhood to attend church with me. I got baptized at age 8, which is the "age of accountability" in the LDS religion. I knew all the answers to the most-frequently-asked doctrinal questions, and could give concise explanations to any member or non-member who asked them of me. I was the little girl that most Christian families dream of having, without much coercion to be such. I participated in church, I loved Jesus, and I didn't say "no" when asked to give a prayer or a talk or recite a scripture.

However, I did all this because that's what you do. That's how it is. The sky is blue. You look both ways before crossing the street. You eat your broccoli. You go to church. You pray. You love Jesus. Because that is how it is. As I grew older, I recognized that the sky being blue is an optical illusion created by the refraction of light. Looking both ways before crossing the street is a safety measure to prevent being hit by a car. Eating your broccoli is good for your hair and your eyes and your body needs the vitamins. But I still went to church, and prayed, and loved Jesus, "just because." (Truthfully, people gave reasons for these things...but they all translated in my 6/7/8-year-old brain as "just because.")

Then, my dad got "sick." Of course, he was sick before this point. But, this is the point where I identified that something was wrong. My parents fought. My dad lost his job -- something that occurred every 18 months or so, throughout my childhood. My mother found out she was pregnant with my youngest brother. My dad became withdrawn, inattentive, and forgetful, which was a far cry from the doting husband and father he had previously been. My parents went through marriage counselling. My father was (mis)diagnosed with depression, and put on meds that didn't seem to affect any change in his behavior. My mom said the word, "divorce." My dad fell in the church parking lot and took me down with him. My mom needed a "break." My dad had an MRI.

And then we discovered that he had a malignant brain tumor, the size of three adult fists, that had been growing anywhere from 2 to 10 years. Daddy had surgery two days later, to remove the tumor. Surgery was supposed to go 10 hours, and went 14. The day after surgery, he hadn't awakened from anesthesia but was showing reflexive responses. A Good Sign. 4:00 the next morning, he suffered a stroke caused by intra-cranial swelling from the surgery. It was a long day, filled with hospital waiting rooms and weeping relatives and neighbors reciting Death for Dummies to a fully-aware-of-what-is-happening me and a prayer my uncle gave that released my dad's spirit from his body, so that he could return to God. Daddy was declared brain dead at 8:07 that night. He was 36 years old, and would've turned 37 a month and a half later.

I was 9, suddenly a grown-up and stuck in the body of a child. My brothers Charlie and Evan were 6 years and 20 months. My mom, 32, was 6 months pregnant with my youngest brother, Whit.

There we were. The Widowed and the Fatherless. Straight from the pages of the Bible itself. (James 1:27 KJV.)

And this is when everything shifted. "Of course everything shifted, Sefii. Your father died." Yes. Yes, he did. But my prayers shifted. Instead of praying to God and giving thanks for all my many blessings, and asking that everybody in the world be nice to one another, beseeching forgiveness for my "sins," in Jesus's name, my "prayers" to God shifted to conversations with my dead dad. Asking him to watch over us and protect us. To let my mother know that we're going to be okay. To make Whit be a happier baby. My prayers to the Father of my Immortal Soul became pleas to my once-corporeal dad to watch over and bring peace to my broken-hearted family in its ephemeral existence.

Eventually, I came to realize that my pleas were part of the bargaining stage of the grief process. That I was essentially on my knees each night, talking to myself. Whether or not there was a God, I didn't care. I couldn't communicate with Him. And even if I could've, I probably would've chosen the silent treatment instead. I was angry that my dad had been taken away from my family. My church leaders told me it was because God had an important job for my dad, and had called him Home to help Him. I looked at the young widow sitting in a pew, three little boys sandwiched between her and me, and could not begin to comprehend a job more important than the one my dad was not there to fulfill.

So a silence extended between me and any Higher Power that may have had some part in reassigning my dad to Heaven Duty over being a father and a husband to four cute kids and a beautiful wife. Eventually, I stopped being able to justify the existence of a merciful-but-just, omnipotent, omniscient, parental God with all the pain and suffering in the world.

And now I'm here, sitting before you. The Godless and The Fatherless.