He Didn’t Want to Continue Journey, but He Has Reason

The beautiful 8-year-old girl with the curious eyes and the serious expression is wearing her Catholic school plaid jumper. When she returns from a trip to the bathroom, she whispers to her father, “Daddy, everybody was staring at me.”

And Al Joyner whispers to Mary, “It’s because you’re so beautiful, honey.”

Al Joyner is protective of his daughter. He does not want her to think that people might stare or point because they know that she is the daughter of Florence Griffith Joyner.

It is only the two of them now, Al and Mary, almost all the time. Since Sept. 21, the morning when Al and Mary woke to find that his wife, her mother, Florence Griffith Joyner, had died in her sleep, it has been Al and Mary helping each other to keep on living.

On this spring night, six months later, Al and Mary have come to a restaurant in Mission Viejo for some dinner and talk.

It does Al good, he thinks, to talk about Florence and also about Mary. It does Al good, he thinks, to speak all he can of what Florence had wanted to accomplish. It does him good to have finished the book that Florence had nearly completed. “Running for Dummies,” it is called, part of the series that had started out with computer books for “Dummies.”

But Florence had wanted “Running for Dummies,” to be a little different.

“Florence wanted to make sure she had stuff about her beliefs about family and children,” Al says. It was his duty, he says, to make sure people saw passages like this: “I see a lot of parents pushing their kids in sports and I think sometimes it’s because they may have missed an opportunity and want to live vicariously through their child’s sport. What these parents don’t realize is that every kid is great, no matter how far they go in sports.”

Al looks at Mary, who is eating chicken noodle soup and singing to herself, and, without his knowing, a hint of a smile forms. Smiling doesn’t come easily to Al. If it were up to him, he says, he might not yet have gotten out of bed.

“Every day, I wake up and have to convince myself that there is a reason,” he says.

He speaks quietly so that Mary doesn’t hear. But every morning Al does get out of bed because of Mary. Because of Florence and Mary really.

“One thing about Florence and I, we talked a lot about what our expectations were for Mary,” he says. “We spoke a lot about not pushing Mary into sports but about pushing Mary a lot into academics. You know, it’s because of Florence that Mary is in a Catholic grade school. We had to be on a waiting list for two years. Mary finally got accepted this year.

“That was so hard on Mary too, she had just started at this new school and didn’t have any friends and then her mother died.”

Because of Mary, because of her needs, because Al gets up every morning to get her ready for school, because he needs to make Mary’s lunch and make sure her uniform is clean, because he needs to make her dinner--”My dad can cook,” Mary says. “He makes good macaroni and cheese.”--because of all this, Al isn’t sure he has actually grieved for Florence.

“I’m afraid if I have a minute, it will all hit,” he says. Besides finishing the editing on the book, Al has traveled around the country, on a book tour and accepting awards given in Flo-Jo’s honor.

But it is his duty to Mary that Al says keeps him sane and alive.

It is his only joy to see her kicking a soccer ball in the backyard of their Mission Viejo home. Or to hear her suddenly enthusiastic about learning to run hurdles. Or when she suddenly loses her shyness to tell a stranger about having her picture taken with Kerri Strug because Mary’s favorite sport of the moment is gymnastics.

“We were married 10 years,” Al says. “From the beginning, Florence and I talked so much about how we would raise our child. Florence was always sure it would be a girl, you know. For Florence it was so important that the parents would always show the child how much she was loved.

“After Mary was born, Florence would always write a post card or a letter to Mary whenever Florence would leave for a trip. She’d even write a letter to Mary if Mary was making the trip because she wanted Mary to know all of her thoughts and she wanted Mary to know how much Florence loved her.

“So those are the things, the reasons, that I have to live for, to make sure that Mary will always have that legacy and to make sure Mary is raised the way Florence planned.”

There is another job of Florence’s that Al plans to take on. Al and Florence had wanted to write their story.

“I’m going to write that book,” Al says. “It was going to be about how Florence wanted to live her life and our life. That book was important to Florence. I’m going to write it.”

Mary has finished her soup and whispers to her dad again. It is getting late. She is tired.

“Dad,” she says, “can we go home?”

And it is time. Al puts his long arm around Mary’s thin shoulders. Al and Mary go home.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.