There are many dangerous occupations in this country. We read about police and firefighters dying in the line of duty. Accidental deaths on life-risking jobs occur every day.

In the history of our state of Pennsylvania, one of the most significant causes of occupational deaths has happened underneath the surface of the earth in coal mines.

According to Penn Live Patriot News, nearly 1,600 men have perished in Pennsylvania mines since 1869. This number does not account for the thousands injured. The cause of these deaths varies, but when miners were working 300 feet below the surface of the earth, they were in constant danger. Explosions and fires occurred all too often in the first half of the 20th century killing miners by the hundreds, some whose bodies were never found after hours of digging at the sites.

Another cause of coal miners’ deaths was the collapse of the mine’s ceiling that gave way despite the metal braces that were used to support the overhead rock.

One of these deaths occurred in the Jeddo-Highland Coal Company’s number four slope in Ebervale, Luzerne County on June 26, 1935. His name was Frank Strack. He was my grandfather whom I had never met and I knew nothing about.

The newspaper story from the Hazleton Standard Speaker reported that he was buried under rock and coal for 20 minutes before he “managed to extricate himself,” only to die in the hospital two days later.

Frank Strack left seven children without parents. His wife, Anastasia, my grandmother, had died five years earlier from illness at the age of 40. My father was 13 years old at the time of his mother’s death and he quit school in the eighth grade. I’m assuming he did that to get a job and to help his father with the children.

I believe his marriage to a 17-year-old girl who would later become my mother was not only an escape from the burdens of being a surrogate father for his siblings, but a breath of fresh air and a new direction toward a better life. This I know from the love letters I found he had written to her that were stuffed inside a shoe box that I had discovered in our house after my mother died in 1997.

In these letters that Nicholas Strack had written from Lowell, Massachusetts, while working to save money for their wedding, he showered Miss Verna with the loving words, “My darling,” and “My sweetheart.” They had their first child, Nancy, soon after marriage and five years later, Carol was born. I came along five years after her and when I was 2 years old, my father built a house on a dirt road in New Market, New Jersey, which later was renamed to Piscataway.

Life was good for us until his job moved to Maryland and starting all over just never happened for him. A cloud of poverty and sickness hung permanently over our kitchen table which was laden with beer bottles and whiskey glasses most every day.

As angry and ashamed I was of my father, being a rebellious teenager at the time, I have put all the pieces together and 53 years after his death in 1970, I now know why he was never capable of being my dad.

I had dismissed the fact that he tried to support our family during the tremendous stress that caused bleeding ulcers compromised by emphysema, a serious and incurable lung disease. He earned his license for oil burner servicing and briefly worked for a business until his breathing worsened from inhaling the soot from inside the furnaces. His final attempt before he died to salvage a standard of living was driving a lead car for wide load trucks. He never got paid. My mother tried for a year after his death, but failed to get the business to pay him a single cent of what he was owed.

Just like my grandfather who clawed his way out of rock and rubble in a failed attempt to survive, my dad did the same. He tried to dig his way out from the heavy burden of a mother who died too young, from a father who died following heroic struggle, which then brought my dad to a promise of starting a new family only to have the life literally sucked out of his lungs.

Forgiveness requires courage and it’s given when deserved or not. Since I have forgiven my father for never being my dad, I have freed myself from years of emotional pain that I lived with after never having him in my life.

Many years after his death, a psychic channeled my dad to me during a session. Against my skepticism of her ability to speak with the dead, she told me that he had died from a lung disease without any knowledge of who he was or who I was. She then said, “Your father is sorry he was never there for you and he wants you to know that you’re a better man than he ever was.”

No, dad, you’re wrong. I’m not a better man than you. You never gave up hope for a better life. You never quit on yourself or on your family. I now realize where I get my resilience and my determination to always give the best I can no matter what the consequences might be.

Rest easy, dad. I will love you from here to heaven until the day comes when you can give me that great big bear hug. Until then, I will think of the courage you and grandpa had shown and hold the pride we have in our last name for the rest of my life.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com