A Bit of My Life » We’ll Miss You Dad!

We’ll Miss You Dad!

My boyfriend’s Dad, Douglas Styles Sr., just died, and it’s been really tough on all of us. He was young, 55, and had tons of friends both at the bar and on all the job sites that he worked at. He inspired my guy to become a crane operator, and was a strong, quiet man that really opened up when you got a couple of beers into him. Then, he could make you laugh for hours.

The last time I really hung out with him was up at the family cottage. My two sisters came up and I’m glad that he met them before he passed on, he really thought both of them were very nice. He told me that it was OK to drink before noon because it was noon in another country somewhere, and that was all the excuse I needed. He loved fishing and his son and I went fishing with him on more than one occasion. The last time we went fishing with him and his brother off a dam in Buckhorn they were both convinced that I caught something massive, but I lost it in the current. There were so many mosquitoes that you could barely breathe without getting one in your nostrils, so he went out to his truck and got the mosquito zapper and proceeded to wave the tennis racket of death around each of us to make us more comfortable.

My guy has been crying a lot in the last couple of days and he is very upset that he won’t be able to come to our wedding when we get married. I keep on telling him that he’ll be there in spirit, he can’t help but be there because he is his son. I also keep on telling him how proud he was of him and how happy he made him when he came over and discussed the equipment he was operating, union politics, and all the rest of it. He was very happy that he had joined the same union and was doing the same work that he was, work that will never really run out as long as there is construction somewhere in the world.

I think the thing that I will miss about him most is his quiet stolidity, his ability to calm you down simply by having a beer and talking. When my guy had cancer him and his wife had me over for dinner nearly every weekend, and they always kept me laughing. He also had an unnatural love for Pho, Vietnamese noodle soup, and was just thrilled when his brother-in-law married a woman from Vietnam who could cook!! He would tuck in to a bowl of pho with the gusto of a man who hadn’t eaten for days, and it was very entertaining to watch.

He will be sadly missed by everyone and the whole family and his friends loved him very much.