Posts Tagged ‘father’

Remembering Jacob DiNoto

Friday, January 5th, 2018

My heart aches today. I do not know how to put this pain into words, but I will try because there is so much that needs to be said. Death darkened the doorway of a family too young for devastation and took a wonderful man who had only begun living. Jacob Dinoto was my friend, the husband of my best friend, and the father of two incredible daughters I am proud to call my nieces. One year ago today he passed away suddenly and tragically, survived by his wife Mackenzie and his two young girls, one of whom was yet to be born.

In many ways, I fail to find the correct words to describe this feeling because the pain is not my own. I cannot lay claim to this grief even though it tears at my heart and wearies my soul. I know how dreadfully Jacob’s family misses him and the grief of struggling to understand his premature death burdens both his family back in Connecticut and his new family in California. The death of a person so young cannot be justified, especially when they have so much life left to live. But I cannot speak for his family, I cannot speak for Mackenzie or her children, I can only share my memories of Jacob in the hopes that my own struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible may help others facing the same uphill battle. My words cannot be sufficient to encapsulate the pain of Jacob’s death, but I hope they can bring back a piece of the light that Jacob shared with everyone he encountered in life.

When I first met Jacob, honestly, he frightened me. He was dating my best friend who meant the world to me and I would do anything to protect. I did not know him, he was from an entirely different world than mine (or so I thought), he was blunt, intense, and unknown to me. I worried for my dear friend who felt like the closest thing to an angel this world has ever seen, but only because I didn’t realize then what I know now: Jacob was a breathe of light just like her but encased in a different coating.

After I got to know Jacob I realized the truth, that he was an intense man, but only because he loved so fiercely. He loved Mackenzie with an intensity that inspired me. Not only that, but he loved everyone who came into his life with a strength unparalleled. Both he and Mackenzie taught me how to be a good friend by providing a perfect model to follow. Their kindness, generosity, honesty, and genuine passion for the people around them inspired me then and will always motivate me to try to love others with the same ferocity they showed me.

If I can do one thing as an honorary auntie to Jacob’s children, I hope that it is to show his girls the same love both he and Mackenzie showed me.

I want them to know how hilarious and genuine he was in everything he did. Like when he dressed up fancy just to go to different bakeries in San Francisco on the hottest day in the city’s records. Or how we would stay up late into the night discussing conspiracy theories and laughing the night away over games of Scrabble. 

The last time I saw Jacob was his wedding party just short of a week before he passed away. We all had so much fun that night celebrating Jacob and Mackenzie’s love, their future, and their children’s future. Even after the party was over, we spent the night laughing and singing Queen on the karaoke machine. We had so many plans, so many conversations about adventures soon to be had, places we had to visit, and things we were going to do together that would never happen.

The night he died I heard the news while I was sitting in a bar in Berkeley, just a few doors down from where we had once shared drinks. I took the train home like a zombie with tears streaking down my face. I didn’t care who saw me, I don’t even remember walking home from the train station, all I could think of was how could this possibly be?

I sat in my car and cried so hard I got sick. I beat my hands against the steering wheel and the ceiling screaming at how unfair, how impossibly unfair this was to him, to his family, to his wife, his children, and all of the people he would never get to meet. I have never been so angry before in my life than the night I learned Jacob was no longer a part of this world. I was angry at him, at God, at Death for daring to take him, and at everyone else in the world, including myself, for getting to live when someone as desperately in need of living as Jacob, was robbed of his life at only twenty four years old.

I am still mad. I sometimes sit in my car looking at the dents in the steering wheel where my nails cut into it and feel that grief rising up in my throat like bile. Now, however, the anger never lingers long. Because after all of the sadness and the pain, I remember his two little girls. I remember how much he gets to live in them.

When baby Rosemary was born I spent the night with Mackenzie in the hospital and held Rosie all night long. Late that night when Mackenzie was asleep, and it was just me and Rosie awake under the soft light of a hospital TV, I spoke to Jacob. I told him how much Rosie looked like him, especially when she furrowed her eyebrows just like he always did. I told him how his children would always know what an amazing man he was. I told him how much it hurt me that it was me there at the hospital holding his daughter instead of him. I told him how grateful I was that he came into our lives even though he left us too early and how grateful I was that he was able to have two wonderful daughters who would carry a piece of him everywhere they went.

The fact that Jacob never got to meet Rosie breaks my heart beyond what words can express. But I am so grateful to have both her and Bella in my life. Without Jacob, I never would have been so blessed by his amazing children.

This last year has been so incredibly hard, but in so many ways, Mackenzie and Jacob and their children have been the only thing that got me through some of my darkest times. The joy they bring me is ineffable and the love they have taught me will always be in my heart.

Even though it has been a year since Jacob’s death, I feel like I get to see him every day in some small way whenever I get to see his kids. The pain may never fade and my heart breaks for Mackenzie and all of those he left behind, but I am just so incredibly grateful to have ever met him.

I miss you every day my friend, thank you for the gift of your presence, and I hope to show your girls just a little bit of the love I know you would have given them.

If you are interested in donating money to help Mackenzie and her two young children live life after the loss of Jacob feel free to contribute to the GoFundMe page dedicated in his memory: In Memory of Jacob DiNoto

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You Found Me

Friday, August 30th, 2013

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The tremulous touch of God’s presence is the palpable essence of electricity in the air before lightning touches the barren earth and thunder roars across the sky. This was what I felt when I encountered you. The hair raising slowness of breath when one encounters the Divine. Yet you, the unassuming, the plain, the patchwork pattern of a human being, knew not what was hidden behind your graying cataract eyes. Could you possibly have known? Could it possibly have been you? Cross knitted eyebrows and deeply etched forehead disguised in the baggy weightless clothing of a man lost under his own skies; I found God.

I suppose it took me a while to get to this point. I looked and searched for where it was that I found you, made up my own stories or even pretended I never felt your touch, but now I see with eyes wide open when it was that I saw your face truly for the first time. It was here. Tel Aviv, Israel, lost in the whirlwind of pigeons taking flight, creatures finding their wings, that I first encountered the divine. It may sound silly or even slightly deranged, but it is true, maybe even the truest part of me, that has seen within the faces of ordinary men, the image from which we were created. Felt the lightnings grip grab hold of my heart strings and play my soul like a harp into the deafening thunder of life’s storm. This was the first.

Another day in Israel. I walked in a huge group of my peers and as we moved on from one place to the next I noticed the swarm. The ebb and flow of flight and earth, of nourishment and hallowed hollowness. A man stood in their midst throwing crumbs to the birds who encircled him. He, the host of these winged creatures, the eye of the storm. In the flight of the birds he looked up and gazed right at me. Out of the entire group of forty, I was the one he locked eyes with and I felt the staggering weight of a gaze I could not hold.  I thought him homeless, and when he stopped what he was doing to make his way to where I stood, I felt as if I could not breathe. That if I could hold my breath long enough, I could stop the world from spinning, could stop his feet from moving, but he knew the path he had to travel whether I willed it or not. I was afraid of the stranger who approached so directly, who stared deeply into my eyes without ever knowing me, but some how, unwavering and unquestionably he knew. I was afraid as he came so close, and I knew not what to do or where to turn. To shout? To retreat? To escape this force of nature bound in the humble being of this man. I did nothing. I stood still, wired by his electricity that only I seemed to see.

He came to me with open hands, he came to me and called me mother, sister, daughter, he called me home. He looked into my eyes and told me that here, here I would always have a home. He told me he would give me the shirt off his back. He told me that he had nothing, but would give me whatever I asked. He told me I would always have a place to rest my head. He told me that I was home. Why? Because we were family. Because we all were tied beyond the binding of blood, bound by our utter being. We are one, we all have the same Father, and he his son and I his daughter.

He did not even know my name, yet he offered me all he had and beyond that, he offered me what he knew would and always had belonged to me, love. He offered me the obvious, the object of my desire that I had time and time again always failed to see. An eternal love that was beyond me, beyond him into the electricity of non-being.

His gaze never left my eyes as he offered, as he gave, as he sacrificed, as he begged me to understand. I didn’t. Days, weeks, months later, I didn’t understand. But now, now I finally think I am beginning to understand what it was his aging eyes begged of me. He was asking me to come home.

I had long ago lost the way, found myself in a dark wood where the forward way was lost with no Virgil to guide me. I had wandered into the desolation of my own accord, blaming the world, blaming him, and not understanding that through it all and finally at the end of it all, it was Him begging me to come home.

He was not homeless. He had a home that was open and welcome to all who cared to stop and listen to his kind empathetic words. He was direct and almost frightening, but only to the eye that knew not what he was. Strength is frightening, especially when we are so weak, but that does not make it cruel. He seemed a beggar because he was. He was the father begging the son to come home. The mother begging for the life of her children. Begging, broken and bruised, he begged for me, he begged for you. If there be only one righteous, let them live. Let them live let them live.

I didn’t know it yet, but at that very moment the lightning flash of this encounter resurrected me, brought me back to life into this utterly new being. Brought to life in the eye of the storm, I have not yet found my way out of the darkness but with new life comes new strength to forge on into the great unknown. I can, I finally can, knowing that at the end of every road is my ever welcoming home.

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Rage (A Sheltered Cove)

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Hands shaking as fingernails bite
Into the palms of his hands
Clenched into tight fists
Trying to suffocate his rage
Choking on words which burn
In his throat like poison
This bile in the belly of a monster
Belongs not to a demon but a man
With eyes that burn with anger
Smoldering like embers in dark sockets
Even as their fire dwindles
Into the soft glow of feigned comfort
They have the power to burn
Power to set the world on fire
But here and now
His rage has no place
Except in the quiver of his fist
And the monstrosity of his eyes
He lets out a long forced breath
Letting his body go slack
And his eyes slowly drift closed
Wraps a controlled arm around
His little girl’s shoulders
Which shake with quiet little sobs
Bringing her in close
To shelter her from the world
That took the light from his eyes
Wrung out his heart until all that was left
Was this bitterness, this rage
This monster
That even as this wrath builds in his chest
He pushes it back down
Forcing a gentle, unnatural smile on to his face
Holding his daughter as she cries
Turning his hollowed out chest
Where his heart should have been
Into a cove of resounding calm
To harbor her heart and make sure
That hers, unlike his, would survive
The cold abrasive storm
As he held her tight in his arms
Looking ahead with dead determined eyes
She would survive
Even if that meant what was left of him died
He slowly unclenched his fist
Which had gathered in rage
Opening it out of love
To wipe the tears from her face
And with a calm and controlled voice
Hinted with the melancholy
Of humanity’s cacophony
He whispered in her ear
Everything is going to be all right

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