31 Days, 31 People Day 24: BARRY

I think my sister said it best at my dad’s funeral back in 2012, “It was not easy being my dad’s daughter…” It’s true. It was certainly not bad like some kids have it. I think things got better as we got older, but I can’t speak for my sister on that one. Growing up with Barry Craig Isom was not easy.

Sometimes I think when a person passes on, it’s easy to forget all the difficult and painful things you may have experienced with them and put all focus on the good. That’s definitely where my memories go first. But I feel like I’d be leaving out a lot of the things I’ve become grateful for if I left out all the stuff that was hard. The hard stuff shapes us just as much as the good stuff maybe, in some cases, even more. So maybe some peeks at those things are OK too.

My dad was a Vietnam Veteran, and a good man who loved us. There was a lot of PTSD. My mom had stories from before I was born, of months he slept on the floor because the bed was too soft or he’d stay up through the night keeping watch outside in the bushes. Times he’d wake up in fighting defense to the slightest movement of the cat jumping on the bed. The jumpiness remained throughout much of my childhood. He never could sit at a restaurant with his back toward the door. We learned it was not a good idea to surprise my dad or catch him off guard.