The First Fathers Day Without The Father…
It’s the 70’s. We’ve just moved from the little red house in the country to a big white house in town. Dad is in prime of life. Things are looking up for the family. It is a Friday afternoon, and I, the oldest child, am about to take my little brother and sister back to the grandparents for the weekend.
I was sixteen, full of oats, and liked to drive fast. I hadn’t announced it, but I had a private plan, to see if I could make it all the way down I-10 without getting passed by anybody.
It’s kiss-kiss, and hug-hug, and slow leaving, but finally my siblings are loaded up and here we go. I start the car, glance up and see Mom and Dad side by side, all tender eyed. Put it in reverse, start backing out, until I notice Dad at the window. I roll it down and he says…
…”Everything that matters to us is in this car.”
That is the untouchable moment. Oh, so that’s what love is.
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January. Either it’s so recent, or it’s so far back, and I can’t make a vote on which. People still come up to me, that look, head cocked a little off center, a look we give sick people, and say, “How ya doin’?” not sure if the eggshells have been swept up yet.
Thanks for asking: mostly, I’m grateful.
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Lot of you have known some death, and known it worse than I have. I got a three month warning; some people get a three-in-the-morning phone call. A guy told me, “I used to think about putting a pillow over Daddy’s face, just to put him out of his misery,” but my father got a long drifting-off kind of end without the torture of pain.
“For everything there is a season…a time to have, a time to lose, and a time to appreciate the having had…”
I thought we’d decided to dress Dad in his everyday casual clothes, but when I saw him in the casket he was wearing a suit and tie…but small potatoes, especially thinking of you who’ve had closed caskets.
So I use the word, grateful, and mean it. A lifetime of church seems so bland, compared to the spirituality of my father’s end, and not just the end-end, but the whole thing, from hearing the word cancer, the decline, all of it, the way my father proved out who he was, and what he stood for, true to his faith and character standards…
(Honest Jones here, we think of death as the plant dying…but with my father, his death was like the plant finally launching the one big beautiful flower it was meant for.)
It was what church aspires to be, my ole man, and The Eternal Ole Man, shedding the husk together and getting to the beloved soul, taking it right to the end, and then going elsewhere, to begin forever.
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And so, ready or not, I enter the parentless stage of life. Maybe I should feel afraid, but I don’t. The Padre left me full. I know what character is, I know what kindness is, I know what steady looks like, I am an eye witness to patience, forgiveness, and gentleness. I know faith.
This guy I know…met him when he was robbing Peter to pay Paul to keep his baby business afloat – now he’s a paper millionaire – he’s been following the Bedtime Stories, me writing about my dying father, and he’s chewing about something I said, “…my father is the Christianish Christian I will ever know; that ain’t a small thing for a child to say about a parent.”
He’s rethinking his ambition. Not the inheritance, not the money, he says, but if one day his son felt the same about him, then he’d consider himself a successful father.
Aspire away, and do…and maybe one day your son will be in my shoes, his first Father’s Day without a living father, and yet grateful, grateful, grateful…
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories are brought to you by Eighty-one, where we hope you appreciate what you have, or had, and wish to keep the legacy chain going.
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