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When my sister's and brother and I sat down to write our Dad's obit, we never dreamed it would be the task it turned out to be. Or that it would leave us feeling as though we had exposed Dad too much and yet so much was left unsaid. It was hard enough that this man was gone; it seemed impossible that someone like him could and would succumb to death. Dad was a force of nature, to all of us he was bigger and stronger than his last days would belie. He was at once the man we knew and loved and a man we didn't know at all. We knew Dad had been in the service in WWII we knew he'd been in the Pacific and that he was a Sergeant. But that was the extent of our knowledge of that part of his life. We were more than a little surprised to find that he had nine bronze stars and various other metals for acts of honor and bravery. He'd never said a word about it. The list of things we didn't know about Dad or only had hazy awareness of mounted as we went through his papers. The obit was getting longer and longer, how had this man fit all of this into one life time? But this list of his accomplishments left us cold; it was a description of a man we had only a vague concept of. We knew that Dad had been an involved person, doing community things like the ice cream truck and the pancake breakfasts but that wasn't who he was at home. The man we knew was the mountain man, the hunter, fisherman, and the gardener. My oldest sister said, "We have to mention his gardens". I agreed Dad's gardens were the part of Dad that we knew well. But after all the other things said about him it was just a single sentence. Bill was an avid gardener. It was so lame; it didn't even come close to telling the story of Dad's gardens. We wanted to say more, we wanted to say but you don't understand we never ever "bought" a single fruit, nut or vegetable, or rarely meat for that matter. Dad provided all the food for our large family by his own hand and he wasn't a farmer. He was an Indian; he hunted and gathered for us. And he gardened

I need to walk away from writing the obit; I need to go to where the Dad I know would have been. Walking out the back door of my parent's house onto the patio where we had had a million family picnics and the fire place Dad built eons ago stands looking every bit its age. I look at the cement slabs he poured to make the patio; all our names are etched into them and the dates. Dad never poured cement that he and whoever was with him didn't sign

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