It’s my dad’s birthday today. I write this for me, more than for you, so I apologize for my selfishness. He would be 104, born November 29, 1919. That number seems a ridiculous notion, because surely if he hasn’t aged, then neither have I. Where he is suspended in time, his strength intact, his grip firm, his laugh loud and hearty, I have faded. I still speak of him in the present tense; I always will.
Had he the opportunity to become an elder, he willingly would have accepted that responsibility. He would have taken what he learned in his life, what he learned from those who came before him, learned from his trials and failures as equally as from his successes, and passed that information on. He may have always been an elder in spirit. I don’t think you engage in a world war and not realize how fragile our existence is and how somewhat meaningless we are on the world scale, while being irreplaceable within a family. His passing was like the snapping of the stem of a dandelion going to seed, where the seeds scatter on the rocks with little soil to burrow into; the unit that once was, suddenly gone.
No one whispers his name now. Too many years have passed, and it is only a few who share stories of him. That is the law of life. We say the names of those who write literature and those who wash paint across a canvas. We certainly say the names of those who damaged the world with their horrendous intents. But no one is more memorable to me than the man who sat at the piano and played a tune that came from inside him, without notes on the page, the sound of thoughtfulness and sometimes melancholy, and he played with me at his feet breathing in the sound. The man who drove his tractor up and down the field until late at night, the tractor’s light dancing on my bedroom wall, as he tried to sort out the day’s worries. The man whose gentle hands rubbed Vicks on my chest, with a dab under my nose, when I coughed, tying a rag around my neck to hold in the warmth. The man whose curiosity gave him the courage to try new things in farming. The man who sat in his green chair angled slightly to the television while he listened to the news, intent on the warnings that might be there, leaning in at times with his elbows on his knees so he might hear every word, hushing me as I crawled into the tiny V-shaped space open beside him when he crossed his legs. I loved that spot, where I could place my head on his chest and listen to the whooshing of his heart, not able to hear his heart’s flaw that would eventually and prematurely stop its whooshing sound.
I used to remember his death more than his life, but there hadn’t been a whole lot of life within which the two of us shared days when you’re looking back from the future, but they were wonderful days, days I wouldn’t trade for thousands of days of something else, though I was willing to sell my soul to go where he had gone, whispering in his ear as he lay prone on the floor to please take me with him. It is only in the last half of my life that I have been able to let the details of his leaving fall to the side and celebrate instead the memories of who he was to me. The patience with which he shared his wisdom, letting my small hands learn to shuffle the cards for a game of Crazy 8s, letting me pound a nail with far too many misses and strikes, while he waited, or change a tire, or cut a sheet of drywall, or deliver a calf, his warning always in my ear – never let a boy do something you can do for yourself. His mother taught him, gave him his perspective of life, that women are equals.
I miss him, I miss his kindness, his laugh, and his guidance. Some days the missing bends me double, but those days are few. On more days now, the missing of him makes me feel light and airy, having had the privilege of being loved by him. He wouldn’t have judged my failures, and he would have celebrated my strengths and wins. He would have chased away my feelings of having no value. I am his legacy, though it may not seem like much to anyone looking in from the outside. He knew of my wounds and would have, in those last moments of breath, tried to package them up and take them with him, hoping to give me peace. If a brown-eyed, once blonde-haired child still feels his love almost fifty years later then his life, though too short, was well-lived.
wendistewart@live.ca
