By Scott Rainey
My father died at the age of 72. I had just turned 30 — my parents were in their mid-forties when I was born, no small feat for the late 1960s. Dad was healthy and active, and had the blood pressure and cholesterol of a 25-year-old. He was a WWII vet who enlisted in the Navy illegally at age 16, retiring from the service at 39 as a Chief Boatswain’s Mate. He only went to the 8th grade (though my mom helped him get his GED back in the ’50s), but he was the wisest, smartest man I knew.
He was killed in a freak car accident. He was leaving his home one summer morning in 1999, and he had to turn left onto the highway. Looking to the east towards the sunrise, the highway has several bumps and dips, which is probably why he didn’t see the massive Ford F-350 bearing down on his ’92 Chevy S-10.
He ended up T-boning my dad’s rig at at least 50 miles per hour directly in the driver’s side door. His little truck was knocked close to 100 yards into a field.
The best we can figure, Dad spotted the Ford and gunned his engine to get across the highway, and the driver of the Ford tried to go in front of him, crossing the highway into the opposing lane. He ended up T-boning my dad’s rig at at least 50 miles per hour directly in the driver’s side door. His little truck was knocked close to 100 yards into a field.
The tough old SOB had his aorta literally severed, among other catastrophic injuries, but still managed to live another six hours before finally giving up the ghost after surgery.
My first words when my brother told me how he’d died were, “That’s impossible. Superman can’t die in a car wreck.” But he did.
See, Dad and I would typically talk about once a week. After the death of my mother, he remarried and moved across the country to where he’d grown up, and I later moved to another state myself. It would typically be Sunday mornings, and we’d chat for 20 minutes or a half hour about whatever was going on in the world — movies we’d seen, how his beloved Dodgers were doing, that sort of thing.
However, the week before he died, he called me three different times, all at distinctly odd hours. I was on the West Coast and he was in the Eastern time zone, meaning there was a three-hour time difference, yet these calls from him came after 8 p.m. my time — well past the bedtime of a septuagenarian, active and healthy or not.
In each call, he only spoke for a couple minutes, dispensing with the regular pleasantries to deliver the same message:
“Son, I just want you to know I love you, I miss you, and I’m proud of you.”
That was it. The same message, three times. I love you, I miss you, and I’m proud of you.
The week before he died, he called me three different times, all at distinctly odd hours.
He was not one of those men who was reticent about sharing his feelings, and he’d often told me and my brothers the same thing, but the timing and nature was so out of character. These talks, unlike our typical ones, lasted just a couple of minutes. And of course there was the late hour of the calls.
Monday afternoon after these conversations, I was on the way home from work. I got a call on my primitive 1999-vintage cell phone from my girlfriend (later to be my wife), telling me as gently as she could that my father had passed.
I cried the whole way home, and was shocked into my statement about Superman by my brother’s call.
Yet, as I look back, I can only smile. I don’t know if Dad knew something, or felt something, or just randomly decided to call his youngest kid a bunch of times to share a message of fatherly love.
But it stays with me as one of his greatest gifts, and one that I try to pass on to my own daughters as much as I can now that they’ve grown up and moved out themselves:
I love you, I miss you, and I’m proud of you.
Scott Rainey is a National Board-certified teacher who teaches 8th grade US history at Jemtegaard Middle School in Washougal, WA, where he has been on the staff since 1998. He received the Veterans of Foreign Wars Department of Washington’s Citizenship Education Middle School Teacher of the Year award for 2021-2022. He is married to his best friend, his wife Katrina, and is the father of three adopted daughters. He loves the Beatles, 80’s alternative rock, Shakespeare, geocaching and traveling.
Top photo: Louis and Scott Rainey at home in Seal Beach, Calif. Scott was about age 3.
East County Citizens’ Alliance welcomes essays from local writers. Please contact us at eastcountycitizens@gmail.com.
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