This Christmas, we’d like to share these stories—these gifts—of wonder, faith and eternal life
Rhonda Gill froze as she heard her four-year-old daughter, Desiree, sobbing quietly in the family room that morning in October 1993. Rhonda tiptoed through the doorway. The tiny child was hugging a photograph of her father, who had died nine months earlier. Rhonda, 24, watched as Desiree gently ran her fingers around her father’s face. “Daddy,” she said softly, “why won’t you come back?”
The petite brunette college student felt a surge of despair. It had been hard enough coping with the death of her husband, Ken Gill, but her daughter’s grief was more than she could bear.
Ken and Rhonda, of Yuba City, California, had met when Rhonda was 18, and they married after a whirlwind courtship. Their daughter, Desiree, was born on 9 January 1989. Ken was a gentle man whom everyone loved. His big passion was his daughter. “She’s a real daddy’s girl,” Rhonda would often say as Ken’s eyes twinkled with pride. Father and daughter went everywhere together: hiking, dune buggy riding and fishing for bass and salmon on the Feather River.
Instead of gradually adjusting to her father’s death, Desiree refused to accept it. “Daddy will be home soon,” she’d tell her mother. “He’s at work.” When she played with her toy telephone, she pretended she was chatting with him. “I miss you, Daddy,” she’d say. “When will you come back?”
Immediately after Ken’s death, Rhonda moved from her apartment in Yuba City to her mother’s home in nearby Live Oak. Seven weeks after the funeral, Desiree was still inconsolable. “I just don’t know what to do,” Rhonda told her mother, Trish Moore, a 47-year old medical assistant.
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