The Year Dad Died

2009 is the year my life split in two.

There was before my dad died…
and there was after.

The day it happened still feels unreal — not because of the details, but because of the way the world shifted in a single phone call. I was at work when my oldest brother called. The second I heard his voice, I knew something was wrong. Not the everyday kind of wrong — the kind that stops the world before you even understand why.

Then he said it.

Dad was gone.
A construction cave-in accident.
Sudden.
Violent.
Final.

My legs went numb. I remember coworkers crowding around me — steady hands on my back, arms around my shoulders, faces soft with shock. They didn’t know what to say, and honestly, there was nothing to say. But their presence kept me from collapsing.

One coworker insisted on driving me — because I couldn’t drive myself.
I shouldn’t have.
I was shaking too hard.

She drove me straight to my kids’ elementary school. I still remember walking through those doors in a daze, signing them out early, trying to explain without really explaining.

Then we headed to the farm — the place we always went when life cracked open.

My mom had been up north near the job site when it happened — they’d spent the weekend in their motorhome — but I didn’t talk to her until I arrived up there later. Nothing can prepare you for seeing your mother after she’s lost her husband in an instant. Her grief said everything words couldn’t.

The drive from southern Minnesota to northern Minnesota felt endless — hours stretched by disbelief, silence, and the kind of grief that doesn’t have language yet. I won’t go into all those details here — that part is for the memoir — but what I will say is this:

Nothing prepares you for the moment your world breaks in half.

My dad wasn’t just a father.
He was a force.
My grounding.
My reminder that no matter how hard life got, I could get back up again.

He was the one who opened my bedroom door during the worst depression of my life and said — without judgment, without pressure — that it was time to keep going.
Time to live.
Time to show up.

Losing him didn’t just take him away.
It took the version of me who believed he’d always be here.

The weeks after his death are a blur — paperwork, planning, people coming and going, food I didn’t taste, nights I didn’t sleep. I remember staring at the fields behind the farm thinking, How is the world still turning like nothing happened?

Grief is strange that way.
Life keeps moving even when you can’t.

But here’s the part I understand now:

His death didn’t end everything. It started a new chapter of me I never expected to write.

A chapter where I had to grow up in ways I never wanted to.
A chapter where I learned that loss can shape you without destroying you.
A chapter where grief became the teacher I didn’t ask for — but needed.

If you’ve ever gotten a phone call that changed your life…
If you’ve ever stood in the middle of your normal day and felt the ground fall out from under you…
If you’ve ever watched the world keep spinning when yours stopped —

You’re not alone.

With heart,
Rebecca