FORT MEADE, Md. — As she’s standing in one of the small rooms of Jewish Hospital in downtown Louisville, Spc. Marissa Keith, then a 15-year-old sophomore student, undergoes a wave of emotions, seeing her estranged father lying in the sterile bed. This hospital visit, one prompted by an urgent phone call made from her sisters to her mother, was the first time Keith had seen her father in years. Due to her father’s substance and alcohol abuse, Keith’s parents split when she was younger, resulting in a seven-year hiatus from his presence in her life. What started off as a dry conversation between herself, her father and the rest of her family in the room slowly flowed into warm conversations filling the room with laughter.
This moment marked the beginning of Keith’s difficult journey to empathizing with people’s hardships, learning to be accepting of people’s flaws, her father included, and realizing their mistakes don’t define them.
“As a 15 or 16 year old, you’re starting to recognize your parents more as people,” she stated. “People with personalities, you know, and you start to see them as people who have flaws just like you do.” After seeing her father for the first time in years and having the opportunity to talk with him, Keith began to recognize bits of herself in him and a curiosity developed for the stranger she once knew, yearning to learn more about him.
“He loved math and he was an honor graduate in high school,” she exclaimed.
“And he was just highly intelligent, the way he spoke was something that was completely unexpected to me.”
“He was very well-spoken and so just figuring those things out about him, like getting to see those little bits of myself in my father, whom I had never had that experience with before, was so monumental in developing the way I felt about him,” she continued.
Following the hospital visit, an overwhelmed Keith struggled with a paradox of emotions. While she was grateful for the information her father shared that painted a picture of the person he was before his addiction, she struggled with the ugly truths she wasn’t privy to.
“I went through a depressive episode,” she confessed. “I didn’t really understand a lot of the feelings that I was having.”
“I didn’t understand why he would choose to do the things that he did,” she continued. “It was a pretty long period of a couple years where I was just completely lacking understanding and it was very frustrating for me.”
Keith made use of the alone time she had as a kid, learning to converse with her inner dialog. She journaled thoughts that were too sacred to share, writing about her father and the monsters she was battling from the frustrations of his addiction. She gave herself space to feel the emotions, no matter how intense, and methodically thought of ways to aid in conquering any impediments to her emotional progress. Her method to the madness served as an armor of strength to continue her relationship with her father.
Unfortunately, things took a somber turn when Keith’s father tragically relapsed, leading to his passing. Emotions that were once defeated crept their way back in and Keith had to learn to continue doing the emotional work she had done before.
“For a little while, there were some feelings of frustration surrounding that idea of like, dang, he really chose to go back,” she revealed.
“I did that same kind of work trying to understand who he was, the things he had been through,” she continued. “He’s human just like me and the fact that he’s had something really awful happen to him, when it came to watching his mother wither away before his eyes, he just couldn’t get over it.”
Keith empathized with her father’s flaws, understanding that while what happened to him was a tragedy, she needed to forgive him and continue to love him. Despite the circumstances, Keith took what she learned from her journey of accepting her father’s mistakes and applied it in other areas of her life, even now as she maneuvers through the Army.
“The self-help skills that I’ve gained from my experience with my father have translated greatly into how I handle myself here and how I get through the struggles that I face,” she said. “There are definitely people that I didn’t like, but I had to accept them if we were going to work together as a team and accomplish the mission.”
Keith credits the woman she’s becoming to her father. Despite everything that has happened between them, she’s proud of who she is because of it. In the wake of her loss, she’s learned to be more empathetic and understanding of not only her father’s hardships, but the people around her as well.
| Date Taken: | 05.15.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 01.23.2026 17:02 |
| Story ID: | 556698 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 13 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Soldier finds strength through loss, by SGT Deneisha Owens-McParland, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
