The past couple of weeks have been mixed with so many strong emotions... more than I've ever experienced. I guess you could say I have gone through a transformation.
I always thought my dad was going to be there to make-up with. I had visualized "making it big" and then being accepted by my family. He would be proud of me and wrap his arms around me and tell me how much he loved me. But what I had envisioned can never come true because he and I both waited too long. Seven years. Now my father is no longer on this earth; just the shell of the man I once knew, buried in Cleveland's cold ground.
When I got the call I fell to my knees and prayed to the Lord to bring him back. Screaming and crying without end, uncontrollably. I blamed myself for everything and professed I would never get over this...that my life would never be the same. You see I was daddy's little girl and I learned recently that he would say "she's still my first born". In fact, this Thanksgiving (just before he died) he sang a song and asked people to sing with him and when they didn't he said, "If Alisa was here she'd sing with me".
I wish so badly that I could have been there to sing with him. Instead I sang at his funeral... a song that I wrote called 'Stranger's In Time'. I cried all the way through the song...don't know how I got to the end.
7 years. I always looked at families who didn't talk to each other for years and years and looked at them in disbelief and stupidity. Tragically this is what me and my father had become...two souls locked in love and grief.
During these 7 years apart I felt that my dad had disowned me, that he didn't want to talk to me and that he despised me for following my dreams in becoming a professional singer.
If he or I would have called, then we would have both known the truth and the burden that we both lived with and that I still carry would have been lifted. We would have been free.
Free to love, free to forgive and free to forget.
Please if you are separated from a loved one reconnect with them.
Love,
Alisa
