There are a few days in one’s life that are so momentous, they change one’s life forever.

I wrote this a few days before December 5th, 2022.  That was the 50th anniversary of the day my father died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack, two weeks shy of turning 46.

I was halfway through my senior year at the University of Georgia, in Athens, just seven and a half months past my 21st birthday.  

It was a Tuesday.  I had just gotten back to my dorm room from a class, and when the phone rang, I did not expect it to be my middle brother Paul calling, from Savannah.  He was 15, and had never called me before.

“Hello, Rafe, this is Paul.  Daddy died this morning.  You need to come home.”

Those three short sentences that knocked me off my feet.  There was about one week left before Christmas break, but suddenly nothing mattered.  I went up the street to the shop where I had a part-time job, found one of the supervisors, and asked him to tell my supervisor I would not be in that afternoon.

“Sure, Rafe.  What’s going on?”

“My dad died, and I have to go home.”

His face fell, and he looked as shocked as I felt when I got that call from Paul. 

I went back to my dorm, packed my bags, and walked downtown to the Greyhound bus station, and got on the next bus to Savannah, arriving some six hours later.

The rest of that week was a blur.  My parents had separated four years earlier, and then got divorced, so my mom and I and my four younger brothers had moved to an apartment complex a mile south of where I grew up.  That all changed overnight, too.  

The funeral was a few days later, and then we all started grappling with this second major shift in our recent life’s path.  We moved back to the home we had grown up in, and my mom then had to begin navigating life from a brand new perspective.

Fortunately, we had help.  Our family’s lawyer and accountant, both good men and long-time friends of my dad’s, helped us navigate all the confusing legal and financial issues, while my mom struggled to try to keep life on an even keel for me and my younger brothers.  Christmas break came and went, and then we all went back to school, so we at least had some semblance of ordinary routine to hold on to.  Even though that was no longer easy or routine.

My role in the family completely changed at that point.  I was suddenly thrust into adult life in a way that I had never anticipated, and much too early.  My dad was the majority owner (with two sisters, one recently deceased, who left two daughters, both a bit older than me, but not by much) in a family wholesale business, and suddenly I had to learn about that business from a completely new perspective.

I had worked there, summers and Christmases, ever since I turned 16.  But my experiences at that point had mostly been in the warehouse:  stock clerk, order clerk, truck driver’s helper.  I spent one summer in the office, as a records clerk and bookkeeping assistant; then spent the next summer as a Liens Records clerk in the Superior Court Clerk’s office in the (historic old) county courthouse, recording liens and lien releases, by hand, in a huge old ledger.  That was an unexpected opportunity that came up suddenly, and a whole ‘nother story.

After my dad died, I had to learn about the business from an office and board point of view.  I was not at all prepared for that, but, as the old saying goes, sometimes you just have to jump in and learn to swim.  So that’s what I did.

I eventually joined the business full-time, after I got out of graduate school, two years later, and wound up taking my dad’s place as Treasurer and Credit Manager.  My first set of columns in this paper related some of my experiences from that time period.

That one phone call, on Tuesday, December 5th, 1972, changed my life completely.   

Fifty years later, the anniversary still bears marking.  And  I still miss my dad.