A Father's Tribute

We often think that if a child turns out well, the parents must have done a good job. I think the opposite is true, too: a good child can make any parent look good! Sometimes I think this was the case with Devon. She had a quality about her—subtle, like a little breeze—that made everyone around her feel good and be better. Her infectious smile and joyful spirit left an indelible mark on all of us. As a daughter, she could make a good father out of a most ordinary man.

When Devon was two we took her to Flintstones Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She loved all the characters—Fred, Wilma, Bamm Bamm, Dino, Hoppy and the Great Gazoo—but her favorite was Pebbles. She ran up to Pebbles and gave her a big hug. She and Pebbles looked like twins, so from that day on I called her Pebbles. That was a happy moment, one of thousands I’ve had with her. For the rest of her life I’d call her Pebbles just for fun and she’d sign my father’s day cards or birthday cards, “Love, Devon, Your Pebbles.”

It is easy to idealize Devon. From her earliest days in social activities—whether it was hugging a Flintstone, playing with her friends or being part of more formal organizations, like soccer teams, Indian Maidens, ballet class, or a Munchkin in the Wizard of Oz—she could read the cues of people around her and respond appropriately—a hug for those who needed one, a pass to someone in the open field, sharing a bullfrog with a friend who couldn’t find one on her own. She had a finely tuned social intelligence.

Throughout her childhood Devon developed as if she were on autopilot. We only had to feed and clothe her and drive her to her activities—school, soccer, the dentist, a friend’s house—and then pick her up later when it was time. She was so independent—I should say, healthily interdependent—that she almost evolved on her own. I felt lucky to be such a participant-observer in a loving child’s life. The job seemed simple: Support Devon in doing what she wanted. Follow her: she knows where she’s going! As someone posted on her blog, Devon was “a person you couldn’t say no to!” –either because you knew she was right or you knew if you did say no, you’d regret it later! She had, as someone else wrote, “the ability to gently disarm you” without your knowing it and recruiting you into her service. Devon was an easy child to raise, if ‘raise” is the right word. She had advanced leadership skills by age 9!

I was fortunate to be Devon’s father, though at times I felt I had to live up to some pretty high standards! She literally showed me ways to be better at what I am, as a person, a father and a teacher. Three years ago, she showed me how to make PowerPoint presentations and set up my own blog! I was an old-school chalk and blackboard professor and a simple writer! I had fun with the new skills she gave me. I made nice slide presentations for my classes and wrote a lot of illustrated essays on the blog she set up for me. She was a good teacher, very patient with her forgetful and slow-learning dad, emailing me the same instructions over and over again on how to grade papers online using the Insert and Comment features.

Devon seemed born with the ability to do the right thing at the right time. She had a built-in guidance system, an awareness of the moment, of being in the moment, and of knowing whom she was with. While she was accepting of life, she was driven as an artist is driven to shape the stuff of life into the image of her ideals. She was unstoppable in the pursuit of her goals. When The Lion King came out on DVD in 1994, she persuaded me to buy it and watch it with her. It was about a father lion, Mufasa, and his son, Simba, and how the son had to overcome conflict within himself to rise up and take his rightful place in the pride, in “the circle of life.” She knew I’d like it because of my work conducting fatherhood workshops. She knew I’d connect with the story’s theme, voiced by Simba’s slain father in deep tones coming down from a darkened sky: “Simba, look inside yourself. You have forgotten who you are. Look deep. You are more than what you have become. You must take your place in the Circle of Life.” Devon was 14 at the time and I was going through some personal struggles. Following her instincts, she led me to look inside myself through this animated drama and be more than what I had become. That afternoon I wrote an essay about fatherhood which was later published in the Fresno Bee. We all have emotionally significant events in our life, personal turning points, small bursts of insight—or, in this case, a quantum leap of understanding! Being nudged by Devon, driving with her to the store, buying this DVD, watching it with her at home, and then writing an essay that integrated for me my place in the “circle of life”—this was a major emotionally significant event. I imagine for Devon, watching and enjoying a DVD with dad, it was something deeper, too.

One of the more memorable moments I’ve had with Devon occurred the day she came home from school after having a unit in world religions. She was 16. She asked me, “Dad, What am I.”
We had never been active in any organized church or religion, so, given the context of her question, I said, “Well, you are whatever you choose to be. It’s your decision to make.” She then asked, “Well, what are you?” This was more difficult. I described my childhood identity growing up in a large, devout Irish-German Catholic family and how I had de-activated that identity during my university years and replaced it with something more philosophical and nebulous, like an existential-humanistic-phenomenological view of myself and the world. I then got concrete and told her that I was simply trying to live my life by being honest, caring, fair, hard-working and open-minded…with the emphasis on “trying.” I’m sure I lost her with the abstract mumbo jumbo talk, but she did get the basics—honesty, caring, hard-working, fair. I sometimes wonder if she learned to be these things or if they were just in her DNA! What struck me most about this discussion, though—the “teachable moment,” as we call it—is that she asked ME what she was. I thought of how much trust we place in people when we ask them to explain to us who we are. We wouldn’t ask a stranger, “Who am I?” Only someone we trust. I felt another notch of responsibility in this moment and sensed, too, that a shift had occurred in Devon’s development: She was seriously probing the depths of her spiritual identity.

Over the next 12 years, on up until her very last week, Devon continued working out her own answers to the question of who she was. Judging by her writings, the perceptions we all have of her, and the way she conducted herself on the last day of her life, it’s clear she succeeded in achieving a self-confident and well-integrated view of herself. She was authentic, genuine, exuberant and real—a measuring stick of how we might be. A mirror: In her we saw a reflection of pure principles—honesty, fairness, compassion, love of others, intelligence, organization, efficiency, confidence, competence, a great work ethic—the qualities of a beautiful and well functioning human being! How profound is her loss, how deeply we will miss her!

For Devon there were no complaints, no excuses. She believed we are as much the producers of our own destiny as we are products of our past. We are not victims, not martyrs, but determined men and women facing with vision, discipline and moral purpose every challenge life places in our way. She understood that we are interconnected with each other, whether we want to be or not. She was empathic yet maintained healthy boundaries. Her life exemplified how we continually create ourselves through our choices—in school, in friendships, in our work, in all our relations. We either do the right thing or we learn to do it. Even on the very last day of her life, she was trying to get nurses and doctors and her parents to do the right thing, directing us to rub here or there on her neck, organizing in her mind how she was going to get to work next week and use that giant desk and the table and chairs she had us gather from all around Los Angeles to get her work done.

But it was not meant to be.

“There comes a point in everybody’s life,” the novelist James Patterson wrote, “when you realize the stakes have suddenly changed. The carefree ride of your life slams into a stone wall and all those years of bouncing along, of life taking you where you want to go, abruptly end.” So it was with Devon—an abrupt and cataclysmic end to such a meaningful, vibrant life.

Maybe the most enduring lesson to be drawn from Devon’s life is about love and friendship. I experienced Devon’s love and friendship in a very special way, as everyone else did in their own special way. To me she was not just a good daughter—she had become in the end, a very special friend. The poet Gibran wrote that one effect of friendship is “the deepening of the spirit” and that when we part from a friend we needn’t grieve too long, for “that which we love in our friend may be clearer in her absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.” Today, Devon is the mountain and we are standing on the plain.

Louis F. Markert