June 2, 2023
By Kavon Morris ’23:
November 18, 2023 was a regular day – until I got home.
The day started off fine. I went to school just like any other day. I still can remember the day vividly. I had chicken nuggets for lunch, and the track season had just started so I was excited to go to practice after school. Practice was regular; we had an easy workout with only six 150s. But things started to get a little weird after practice.
My mom picked my friend Christian and I up from practice to take us to work at Boston Market for our shift from 5-9. My mom was in a rush, which was weird.
I asked, “What’s wrong? Did something happen at work?”
She kept responding, “Nothing. Work was fine. I Just have to go do something, and I don’t want to be late”.
She’s always doing things with co-workers or friends after work, so her saying she had somewhere to be wasn’t weird.
But the worried look and frantic driving was what was off. She always yells at me when I drive badly so for her to do that was kind of surprising.
Well, she dropped us off to work, and I started to forget about it. Since Thanksgiving was coming up, the Boston Market was really packed with a lot of customers so work was very busy.
My friend Reihanna dropped me home that day. It was a good day for me. School was good, practice was fun, and work may have been hectic, but there could be worse days.
I got home and said “goodnight” to my mom and started to go into my room.
“Hold on, Kavon. Come here.”
So I go downstairs and I walk into my mom’s room.
“Yeah ma?”
It wasn’t anything new for my mom to call me into her room. Usually she wants me to take the garbage out of her room for her or get her a cup of juice.
But when she sat up in her bed, I could tell something was wrong because she began to cry.
“I don’t really know how to tell you this, but your father is missing,” she said as she began to cry even more.
I froze and it felt like she was trying to play some kind of joke.
“Huh? What do you mean ‘missing’?”
But it began to kind of set in.
“We don’t know what happened, but your father was at work, and we think he fell off the boat because nobody on the job site could find him.”
It really started to kick in at this point because I started crying, and it felt like my legs went numb. I couldn’t stand anymore. She got up and gave me a hug. I was hysterical: it was really bad. When she then filled me in, everything started to make sense: like why she was in such a rush earlier because she was going to meet my brother at his job site because my brother and my father worked together.
They’re welders in the same union and on the same site. They worked on an oil dredge out East. The news hit me harder when I realized it was my brother that realized my father was missing. They were getting ready to get lunch, and my father was nowhere to be found. It turned out that my father was taking a rowboat to the oil dredge and unfortunately fell off and couldn’t make his way back to the shore.
This day changed my life forever. I still can’t really believe that it’s almost been 4 months since my father passed.
It still feels like he’s here sometimes, and I miss him dearly.
