Claim: The poem "Daddy's Day" was written in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
Her hair was up in a pony tail, her favorite dress tied with a bow. Today was Daddy's Day at school, and she couldn't wait to go. But her mommy tried to tell her, But she was not afraid; But still her mother worried, But the little girl went to school, There were daddies along the wall in back, One by one the teacher called, At last the teacher called her name, "Where's her daddy at?" And from somewhere near the back, The words did not offend her, And with hands behind her back, "My Daddy couldn't be here, And though you cannot meet him, He loved to tell me stories, We used to share fudge sundaes, 'Cause my daddy's always with me, With that, her little hand reached up, And from somewhere in the crowd of dads, For she stood up for the love And when she dropped her hand back down, "I love my daddy very much, You see he was a fireman But sometimes when I close my eyes, And to her mother's amazement, Who knows what they saw before them, "I know you're with me Daddy," Not one in that room could explain it, And a child was blessed, if only for a moment, |
Origins: It's become all too common to discover small yet important details have been altered in literary
pieces that have inadvertently wandered onto the Information Superhighway. This was once again the case with a poem that has turned up in countless inboxes in that the one small change transformed it into a tale about the bereaved daughter of a 9/11 victim when in fact it was penned more than a year earlier, in 2000.
The poem "Daddy's Day" is the work of Cheryl Costello-Forshey. It has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Parent's Soul and Stories for a Teen's Heart
You see he was a fireman
and died just this past year
When airplanes hit the towers
and taught Americans to fear.
In 2007, the poem being circulted in cyberspace was once again altered, that time to position the departed parent as a Marine who died while serving in Iraq:
You see he is a Marine
and died just this past year
When a roadside bomb hit his convoy
and taught Americans to fear.
Neither was the case. According to its true author, Cheryl Costello-Forshey:
Daddy's Day was written because of a little girl in my life whose father was not a fireman, but who died unexpectedly. It pains this little girl greatly that someone has taken something very special to her, written because of her, and changed it to suit their own needs. Daddy's Day wasn't intended exclusively for the children of firemen, but for all children who have lost a daddy, and especially for one special little girl in my life.
"Daddy's Day" wasn't a factual account of a child's presentation at school; it was a fictionalized expression of what that loss meant to that one
particular little girl and by extension what similar losses mean to all children who lose parents. The classmates who didn't know the girl's father had died were an author's device to help express how often each of us walks by sorrow without recognizing it as such because we cannot see into the hearts of others.
Poems like this one help us to grasp the depth of tragedy by putting a human face upon the plain recitation of statistics and figures about casualty counts and injuries. In the story above, the little girl tells her class not just that her father passed away but also what he'd meant to her, making her loss understandable on a more significant, personal level. He becomes not just the deceased father of a classmate, but a caring and loving man who took his daughter for ice cream and brought her roses.
Barbara "father of the cried" Mikkelson
Last updated: 28 May 2007
Sources:
1-55874-747-8.
1-57673-797-7 (p. 299).