As Brent Green thought back over the legacy that was his dad, fatherly clichés were what reached out for him beyond the grave. He found they became the most important advice. Here’s why.
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The autumnal prairie was where I began to understand him: vast, open spaces and dry wind cascading through tall grasses and flint hills; railroad tracks piercing sunset, promising escape; the stoic determination of hardened, heartland people, meticulously vulnerable.
My father.
While walking among burial monuments in a cemetery near my home, Dad kept leaning over my shoulder to remind me of his coaching. He asked me to reflect upon his thundering, velvet lectures that I had interpreted in childhood as nothing more than harsh corrections.
He told me to consider the superiority of dreams and invention over accumulation and wealth. Or he nudged me to deepen my perspective of moral decency unseating self-serving gain—the victory in not compromising, that particular power of duty.
Lastly, he required me to grasp the ultimate confrontation with mortality and to possess for myself his stubborn unwillingness to live passively when all the active living had been done—better not to live at all. I’ve lived my time, he said.
My lessons.
There can never be completion when a man’s father dies. The unsolvable conflicts. The lingering unworthiness. The profound gratitude. These notions survive, as do a few profound lessons once shared as tattered aphorisms.
Work for yourself, Dad would caution me.
This would be his lifelong dream: to launch a company with his son helping him build a lasting legacy. Instead, he punched the civil service time-clock for thirty-five years, waking more days than not to finish what he had started. He had chosen his path during a time of economic depression; the correct answer was unwavering obligation to choices.
Dad’s after-retirement dreams were of great escapes, when my mother and he would board a silver recreational vehicle and roll into sunset. He wanted nothing luxurious, just the allure of an open road and the adventure of another turn. My chronically ill mother dissuaded intrepid expeditions, so he resigned himself to fishing alone at a nearby lake, floating above his wanderlust in a small aluminum rowboat.
Smell the roses, son, he cautioned, as he watched me pushing through the years, head pressed to the proverbial grindstone.
He had a clear understanding of mortality, the brevity of our days, and even more elusively, fleeting moments of joy. I always thought this to be an ironic caution from a man who answered the grating shouts of obligation more than the tempting whispers of fulfillment.
As a son searches through the years with only memories to excavate, he sometimes uncovers rare nuggets left behind. Decades of dinner table chats, hasty telephone calls, and fatherly advice can reduce to a few simple adages.
Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone, he advised, a reminder to move forward in life, never to linger because things don’t work out.
His health failed for several years, an inexorable spiral from independence to assisted living, from hospitals to a nursing home. A heart attack one morning was all he needed to let go of the reigns, and during four difficult months, he passed through the final stages of dependency. After two days of labored breathing, he released his last breath as a gasp and then a sigh.
My father now marches decisively through prairie fields, an infinite sea of swaying buffalo grass, a 16-gauge shotgun snugly under one arm. His brother is within reach of a shrill whistle should Dad stumble upon a covey of quail or launch a restive prairie chicken into frenetic flight. He strides briskly, a bounce in each step. He is in control of this forever moment—no strings attached to unsympathetic bosses or circumstances that prohibited him from achieving every living desire. Perhaps parked in the background sits a rolling silver hotel under my mother’s control, simple but comfortable.
He is seeing the world as he did during life: for what it gives rather than what it takes. This, I finally understand.
Photo: Flickr/Robert Harwood