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| Betty, Lisa and Jim Packard at Indy 500, May 1960 |
I was born to a millionaire, he didn’t know it then. He still had races to win and years to live. He would have let me work with him in the business because he trusted my mother and I am smart and business-minded like her. He would have built a great empire in the racing world had he lived.... I would have been treated like a princess, a real southern brat, I mean belle.
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| Dan Wheldon with the Borg Warner Trophy |
But it didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. My daddy was killed in a race car in Fairfield, Illinois on my mother’s birthday, October 1, 1960. I was 11 months old and missed him every day. I wondered, ‘where was my kiss, daddy?’, ‘where was my daddy?’ My mother, being very pregnant with my brother couldn’t answer. It seemed she was choosing, maybe protectively, to stare out the window without a tear. Being stoic she felt was the best way to handle his death, but in so choosing a wedge was driven between us no one could ever figure out how to remove. She has grieved him more in later life it seemed than at that moment, and now I understand people grieve in different ways. I learned to understand her and let go, but even with understanding the wedge remained to remind us of our loss.
My brother, on the other hand, grieved a grief few know of; when we were young and skipped school together and sat by the creek smoking mom’s Viceroys, he would say as he looked at me, “I never felt my father’s touch.” .....What could I say to his pain? How many kids have their father die while they are in their mom's belly? I just puffed and handed him the cigarette for his turn…. within a few years I would do the same with a joint and we would feel a bit mellow, even though the pain remained and does still.
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| Dan Wheldon died October 16, 2011 |
I was at a race a few years ago and happened to turn my head at the right time to see a young girl of maybe 10 or 11 reach up on tip toes to give her daddy a hug. He was dressed in a driver’s suit and turned to walk after his car as it was being pushed towards the starting line. I choked on my emotion and I couldn’t breathe. If there is a God, please don’t let that be the last time she gets to hug her daddy.
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| Dan Wheldon at Las Vegas Raceway where he died on the track 2011 |
It happened again... Today, another child’s daddy taken by the track. His boys looked so young and oh so sweet in all the pictures I poured over. I was driven to find pictures, driven to relive what happened, as if somehow watching the horrific crash would scald into numbness the pain still residing in me.
No such luck, the witness, the pictures, the YouTube, made my pain more sharp and raw.
There is nothing left to say, there are no words, yet I'll steal a phrase from a woman who's experienced such pain and sorrow, "death comes quietly as if on cat paws in the night".
