Remembering Tom Davis

This is my first Father’s Day without my dad, Tom Davis, and I miss him.

He was 82 when he died December 7, 2022. It was only five months after my mom, Judy, passed away. Like so many of the families I have worked with at the Family Heart Foundation over the past 10 years, the Davis Family always felt we were living on borrowed time. I am so grateful for all the years we had together. Is it greedy to wish we had had just a little more?

My father had familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) and he passed it on to me. He learned he had FH when we were little, and it changed our lives. My mother fully expected he would die from heart disease and leave her to raise 3 girls on her own. But statins came along, and then ezetimibe, and he took them, and he didn’t die. He exercised – running, fencing, tennis, swimming, boxing – he worked hard to outrun FH.

He lived to see me graduate from high school, then college. He walked me down the aisle when I got married, and we danced to a waltz at the reception – he loved to dance. When I was 28, and he was 57, my father had sudden cardiac arrest while playing tennis. He was revived with CPR, had quadruple bypass surgery, and he didn’t die. He lived to see the birth of my two daughters. He watched his granddaughters while I traveled for my work with the Family Heart Foundation. He told them stories of his childhood and mine and he listened to their stories. We had decades to make memories because he didn’t die from FH, thanks to early diagnosis, new medicines, and life-saving surgery.

My oldest daughter graduated from college last month and my youngest daughter graduated from high school yesterday. My father, Tom, and my mother, Judy, were not there to celebrate these milestones with us. But they had the time to leave a lasting legacy, and I am grateful for all the milestones they were there for.