Father's Day

Today at Mass we said a prayer for all the departed fathers. That was good.

We all lose things in this life...some losses greater than others. From the void created by those things that leave us can spring up strength, passion, fortitude, and, sometimes, even peace.

I was reminded of a blog entry I wrote on my old Xanga when Daddy died. For some reason I remember writing this better than I even remember his funeral.



Written March 27, 2006

54 degrees, and partly cloudy.

At least that is what the weather channel said, matter-of-fact meteorological observations that seemed to be a strange headline for this little tableau. I sat quietly beside my father, now a drying husk rasping for uneven breaths, holding his hand and feeling a peculiar still smallness in the moment.

I have a soul that is hard as steel. I am the one people turn to in crisis, the lee of the stone, the one who will not bend in tempests. It is amazing how something so small as a whispered request can take the iron resolve of one and break it cleanly. My father's little gravel voice came to me and asked me to give him a kiss. I did, holding him close to me in my arms. It was the first time I think my father ever asked me to kiss him in the entirety of my life. It will be the last.

I wept bitterly at times over the last two days, periodically allowing myself to experience moments of grief, knowing without really knowing the empty that is coming. The first time I have to clean a room where my father's things will remain in his stead, shirts and knick knacks, his shampoo and electric razor. They will remind me of the fact that he will never again have need of them in this place.

There is an echo that lingers after a person dies, a hollow sound in a room once filled with them. I can hear it already in my mind, feel the unoccupied space like the vibrations of a television in an empty room.

My daddy called me Pete. Somehow it's the only part of me that ever made sense.