My father

Today is my father’s birthday. Well, it would have been if he still had been alive. He died five years ago. It’s a long time and yet no time at all. I still think about him every day. You don’t “get over” the loss, you learn to live with it, that’s all. Like you learn to live with a missing limb.

At 79, he wasn’t even young and it wasn’t a tragedy in that sense. Still, I refuse to accept it. That this living human being with hopes and fears and smiles and jokes suddenly turns into the content of an urn. I will never understand it and I will never accept it.

I suppose I always identified myself as my father’s son. My father was the person I reported all my adventures to. To a large extent, the very point of going away was to come back home and tell my father what had happened. Without a father there is no home and there is no adventure. My compass is just turning and it no longer stops at north.

I have to be my own father now. But it’s not the same. I’m not as good at it as he was, and I much prefer being a son. My father always stood between myself and all the terribleness of life. Nothing could happen to me that wouldn’t first happen to him.  And then it did. Now I’m next in line, and not nearly as brave as he was.

My father

Today is my father’s birthday. Well, it would have been if he still had been alive. He died five years ago. It’s a long time and yet no time at all. I still think about him every day. You don’t “get over” the loss, you learn to live with it, that’s all. Like you learn to live with a missing limb.

At 79, he wasn’t even young and it wasn’t a tragedy in that sense. Still, I refuse to accept it. That this living human being with hopes and fears and smiles and jokes suddenly turns into the content of an urn. I will never understand it and I will never accept it.

I suppose I always identified myself as my father’s son. My father was the person I reported all my adventures to. To a large extent, the very point of going away was to come back home and tell my father what had happened. Without a father there is no home and there is no adventure. My compass is just turning and it no longer stops at north.

I have to be my own father now. But it’s not the same. I’m not as good at it as he was, and I much prefer being a son. My father always stood between myself and all the terribleness of life. Nothing could happen to me that wouldn’t first happen to him.  And then it did. Now I’m next in line, and not nearly as brave as he was.