You are my Sunshine

My dad’s a trained musician and choral director/performer. I’ve heard him sing everything from The Lord’s Prayer to Try to Remember from The Fantasticks in venues that range from our local Little Theater to Carnegie Hall. He is an incredibly gifted musician who has devoted his entire life to teaching children and adults alike about the joys of song.

As a kid, I took our effortlessly musical home-life for granted. Didn’t everyone’s family sit around the piano (played by my classically trained mother) and belt out Broadway show tunes with their father?

 Despite hearing my dad perform hundreds of times, without a doubt the song I carry in my heart and associate with my father more than any other is You are my Sunshine. From birth through high-school, most mornings my dad’s warm, rich baritone voice would gently coax me from a deep slumber singing, “You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey….”

I have been incredibly blessed throughout my life, and two of my greatest blessings are the parents I am fortunate to have. Steadfast, supportive and unconditionally loving, they have guided me through life with grace. The older I get, the more I appreciate how truly remarkable they are.

I remember vividly one of our adoption homestudy home visits with our social worker. We were discussing our decision to adopt, and she asked me why I wanted children. Tears streaming down my face, my dad’s voice (“You are my Sunshine, my only Sunshine…”) ringing in my head, I answered as honestly as I could – “I want to share the kind of relationship I have with my parents, with a child.”

My musical, twinkly-eyed dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s two years ago. He’s a trooper. I marvel at how he’s been able to take the diagnosis in stride, adapting to his increasingly rebellious body, the twitches and the stutters. “I’ve been lucky, there are much worse things that could have happened to me” is his popular refrain. In the past few months, he seems to have aged at an accelerated rate. I worry that his now more frequent lapses in memory and difficulty processing things hint that his agile mind is falling prey to the disease. His deteriorating muscle control has already robbed him of his ability to sing – a loss I haven’t yet been able to fully process.

I am impatient to become a mother, yes. But my dad’s disease lends an additional sense of urgency to the process in my mind. I am so hopeful that we will be matched with a family and a child soon enough that my dad can be a grandfather. I hope he will have the chance hold his grandchild; and share his extraordinary, enormous heart though his increasingly quiet (but still beautiful) voice.