It is not enough to say that he was a good man, or even a great man. My father’s love is the blueprint by which I love.
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In my room is a work bench – all four-by-fours and steel bolts.
I made it with my father one day last spring. We took the truck to Home Depot to get the wood. It was a long car ride. I had just returned home from Colorado, and I remember we didn’t say much – although we never did. Never had to.
My dad had given me ideas on how to build the table, how to measure and cut the wood. He showed me which tools to use, where to find them in the garage, and then went inside to drink a beer – periodically coming back to check on my progress.
My father was like that. He always gave me the opportunity to make mistakes and the opportunity to learn from them, was there to help me if I failed with his quite reassurance and thoughtful stare.
These days, that work bench I built leans, a mistake in the construction. Somewhere there isn’t a proper brace or enough leverage and now…
I wonder who to ask.
Now, there are so many questions:
How many scoops of food should the dog get?
How often do I water the plants?
Where are the keys to the lawnmower?
How often should a chimney be swept?
These things are, of course, incidental. Soon, they will be eclipsed by more terrifying questions.
For example: Will I forget his voice? This fear was invoked by my mother franticly coming into my room at 6 in the morning, pleading for me to find a way to preserve my father’s voice on the answering service he used for work before it was deleted.
And when you look at yourself – really look – you’ll fumble to count all the ways he’s still with you. He is the music that you still love, the movies you learned to hold dear and still watch. The way you make a sandwich. The way you problem solve. The way you build.
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Then there we were, early in the morning, holding our phones up next to each other, trying to preserve this entity that was once so commonplace. It is the darkest trick of absence – everyday things become precious – familiar and assured trade places with foreign and far away.
The sound of his footsteps on the landing, now an echo I anticipate but that will never come. His chuckle, or a sudden, surprising curse, or that telltale wink are left as facsimiles rendered in 3 x 5 glossies and shaky recordings.
These are poor substitutes, fraudulent and cold, and when you realize this, you are forced to look more deeply for the things your father instilled in you – whatever evanescent memory is still true and alive.
You look at how he shaped you. You start tracing your history, your biology. You look in the mirror, hoping to see some part of him there, hoping to hold his kindness in your own eyes, or his stern resolve in your face. You look for his tireless compassion, the ability to give, to keep giving.
And when you look at yourself – really look – you’ll fumble to count all the ways he’s still with you. He is the music that you still love, the movies you learned to hold dear and still watch. The way you make a sandwich. The way you problem solve. The way you build.
Suddenly you’ll find that this network of roots and the foundation of who you are reach back through the entirety of your life as a way of pointing to this thing, this genesis, this father that is no longer physically here – a huge black hole in the night sky that the stars point to in absence.
How do you begin to eulogize your father?
It is not enough to say that he was a good man, or even a great man. My father’s love is the blueprint by which I love. I follow it and will continue to follow it like footprints in the snow, to love as he loved, unending and strong.
When the doctor told my father he was going to die, when the cinder block fell from his mouth, my father didn’t cry or rage – instead he held my mother’s hand and reassured her, voice calm, “I guess we need a miracle.”
I still feel like any moment he will walk through the door or call down the stairs, remind me gently that I need to change the oil in my car. Like in the hundreds of home movies of us that he filmed, he’s there, just behind the camera, looking over and loving us. And perhaps there is a small comfort in the thought that I will always feel this way. That his heart is so strong and his will so great that now, always, I’ll find him just beyond me, right out of reach.
My brother and I wrote together our father’s funeral address, and I started by saying that I wasn’t sure that I’d get to the end without cracking up, but that we’d worked on the text all four of us (the two brothers and their spouses), and that he was ready to take over from me if needed. It was one of the really great experiences of my life, for us to say how much we loved him and owed to him, to make everyone laugh with some of the funny stories. We both have objects and clothes that belonged to… Read more »
Great stuff. Having lost my father last year, I know there’s a lot of feelings to sort through. May you find peace…
Wow. Beautiful. My sister likes to point out that I walk like my Dad did; this article brings a warm feeling like that. We were lucky to have such great fathers, weren’t we?