At first, David-Paul Cavazos thought the letter a cruel joke.
The handwritten missive began, “David-Paul, It’s me your father. Please don’t think I’m writing you for money or a kidney. I’m writing solely because I’m tired of being scared of how you would feel about me. …. You must know that letting you go was not easy for me. I knew I had to do it so that you would have a better chance at life, a good life.”
It had been almost 30 years that Cavazos had last heard from his father. He was 12, his dad 36.
“I thought he was dead,” Cavazos said. “Or that he hated me. That somehow I had done something wrong.”
Cavazos is chief operating officer for the Southeast Kansas Mental Health Center. He and his wife, Laura, and their young family moved to Iola in 2012 from Kansas City.
The letter that has changed his life arrived in mid-September.
“I’m 40 years old and I’ve just now learned my dad did very much want me,” David-Paul said as he shared his story Sunday night.
That truth has “lifted a big weight off my chest. All my life I’ve secretly harbored the thought that somehow in his eyes I wasn’t lovable.”
After receiving the letter, David-Paul called his father, Richard Cavazos of San Antonio, Texas, who shortly thereafter made the trip to Iola to see his only child.
“We talked non-stop,” David-Paul said of the reunion.
On Monday, the young family left for Texas to be not only with David-Paul’s dad, but also his mother and stepfather who live in Austin.
DAVID-PAUL was 5 years old when his parents divorced.
At the time, his father was his primary caregiver while his mother attended classes at the University of Texas in Austin at night.
“We were never more than 3 feet apart,” David-Paul said of those tender years. “In fact, I rarely saw my mom.”
When David-Paul was 11 his mother married a man who worked as an attorney for the military, causing the family to move to Kansas.
It was then that his mother, Isabel, asked her ex-husband to cease all contact with their son. David-Paul has since learned how this came about.
