A Sad Loss: Our Favorite Family Restaurant

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The first few weeks after Mr. Hart deployed were a little traumatic due to sickness, inability to sleep, nightmares, a very sudden and very stressful family situation and the usual adjustments at the beginning of deployment. So on a Saturday a few weeks after he left, Clementine and I decided to go to our "family restaurant." This was the place where we most likely went out for dinner, Daddy's favorite restaurant, a gorgeous place to eat outside under tall buildings and a big blue sky.

We had been going to this restaurant since Clementine was too tiny to fit on the chairs there. The staff all knew us and when they started a "frequent diners club card" program they told us they weren't giving us a card because we'd already been getting the discount and everyone there knew us. When we walked in the door they asked us how we'd been and we always felt welcome.

So Clementine and I felt like this would be one of the best places for us to go to feel close to Daddy. Our excitement built as we walked from the parking lot around the corner to the restaurant. We turned the corner near the front door and stopped dead still in our tracks. Our restaurant was not there. It was all boarded up.

Clementine and I, both still feeling the bottled up anxiety and stresses of recent deployment stood there, in the middle of throngs of people and broke down in tears. Our Daddy has been taken from us and now one of our favorite connections to him was gone too. The world felt like it was swirling around us. So we sat down and cried for a few minutes as privately as possible. Clementine kept asking "What happened to our family restaurant? We can't ever go there again?" Her questions were painfully unbearable and there were no good answers.

Even worse was thinking about telling Mr. Hart his favorite restaurant had gone out of business. I knew he was already looking forward to his first meal there when he got home. Just months ago the restaurant owners had been planning to open a second location in a neighboring upscale shopping area.

Clementine and I went to another cafe just steps away that we had been to a few times. Our second favorite spot in the neighborhood. But it wasn't the same and we were still saddened and in shock. Our family restaurant was gone. Another little piece of our family history was taken from us. Little did we know that in the coming months more of our favorite places to go with Daddy would go out of business.

And so we wait for our Daddy to come home so that we can find a new favorite family restaurant and start building new traditions. The old landscape of our life, in many ways will be gone, but we have to remember there will be new memories and new favorite restaurants and places to go. I'll be keeping my eye out until he returns for new places to add to the list. But we will forever miss our family restaurant, a place we built many happy memories over the years.