My husband, Ian, did something for me a few years ago, that I will treasure always. He took an old black & white photo of my dad taken around 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 is especially meaningful to me, for my dad died of leukemia on August 3, 1960, when he was 38 and I was 7. Even though my mom married a good man a year later, I missed my Daddy. I don’t know if anyone knew how much I missed him. Mom knew there was a reason for my reverting to my preschool habit of sucking my thumb, 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 rude awakening.

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… and it was extremely frustrating to me that they couldn’t come up with the answers.

Mom always 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. It frustrated me no end that 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 I couldn’t make them real.

I received a life-sized “three-year-old doll” as a Christmas gift. 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, 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. But it was all in my imagination.

My dad has been gone for 61 years. In retrospect, I think I wanted desperately to will him back. I knew that was impossible, so instead I projected that intense longing onto other things.

Imagination is a wonderful blessing. But like anything else meant for our good, it can be used in the wrong way. What could have been a means of coping with the loss of my dad had become something almost as painful as the loss itself. I’ve suffered many more losses since then. But each time, I have learned more about my loving heavenly Father, and His dealings with His children. I know I can trust Him, no matter what happens in this life. His timing is always perfect, and He never makes a mistake. Nothing happens except by His say-so. I don’t need to know the reason why. It is enough to know He has a reason.

I can let go, and trust Him.