My husband, Ian, did something for me a few years ago, that I will treasure always. He took a black & white photo of my dad taken in 1949, when he was 28… and a colour photo of me in 1980, when I was 27… and put them together as one photograph. He colourized Daddy and the background to make it look as if we belong together.

This picture would be a treasure under any circumstances, but I treasure it even more because Daddy died of leukemia in August 1960, when he was 38 and I was 7. I don’t know if anyone knew how much I missed him. My mom knew there was a reason for my reverting to my preschool habit of sucking my thumb again, resisting her every effort to help me to stop. But I wonder if she ever knew the extent of my imaginative play during the next year or two.

My brothers and I would “dive” off the low stone wall that separated our yard from Nita Robinson’s next door… pretending it was the side of a swimming pool and our grass was the water. It was a constant source of frustration for me that I could not really dive into the grass or I would suffer a head injury.

I would gather every doll and stuffed animal in the house and line them up in rows on the living room floor, and play school with them. As the teacher, I would ask them questions that I myself wanted the answers to. But they could never give me the answers.

Mom kept my hair cut very short, and I yearned for long hair like some of my friends. So I would clip long strings of clothespins in my hair and pretend they were braids that went down to my waist. But the strings would invariably break when I swung my “braids” around.

I would fill little matchboxes with grass, and lay the heads of timothy grass on the soft little beds, calling them caterpillars. But they wouldn’t come to life.

I received a life-sized “three-year-old doll” as a gift. In play, I gave her all the attributes of a real little girl, assigned my other dolls as her brothers and sisters, and then conjured up a mother and a father for her, all of whom were very real to me. They did all the things a real family would do… things my own family was no longer doing.

I knew all these things existed only in my imagination, but it was painfully frustrating that I could not will them into reality. Did my mother know about any of this?

I say my mother, because I was closer to her than to anyone else. My mom was my whole world for many years, and she fully deserved that role. She was always there for me. Yet as well as she knew me, I think she would have been surprised if I had phoned her as an adult and told her all that. And now, in looking back, I think she would have been at a loss as to know what to do with me. She knew I had a vivid imagination… and she knew I had absolutely no visible reaction the day she told me my daddy was gone. It is probably a mercy she did not know the extent of what went on in my mind. Would she have understood? Would she have known what to do about it? It eventually passed, although to this day I have problems with trying to will into being the things or people I miss badly. It is only now, in retrospect, that I can look back and understand what was happening during that year or two following Daddy’s death. I think now that it was my way of wishing him back… though I knew it could never be, so instead I projected that intense longing onto other things.

For many years afterward Daddy’s birthday, Sept. 23, was a day when I would strive to live it in such a way that “Daddy would be proud” of his eldest child and only daughter… the child he had named Willena Rose.

I miss my father even to this day, more than sixty years after his passing. I often wonder what my life would have been like had he lived. I am sorry none of my children ever got to meet him. But I am glad that some of my children look like him, and are like him in temperament. Our eldest son, James Gordon, was named for him as well as for his other Grandpa.

One of the most important lessons I have learned since becoming a Christian, is that there will always be a longing in my heart for things and people, once there but now gone. And the only way to fill that longing is not through my vivid imagination, but by allowing my Lord Jesus Christ, through His Holy Spirit, to fill every part of my heart, and all of me. He is real. He never leaves me. He is my best friend, who sticks closer than a brother.