A funny thing happened on the way to my concluding the daily writing of this blog: I didn’t stop. There will invariably still be days when I don’t feel like writing and others when I will be fully inspired to do so. So for now, I’ll keep at it. Those who read faithfully will continue to do so, as will those who read periodically. If something touches or inspires you, I hope you’ll comment, either here or on Facebook. Thanks for reading. Now for tonight’s post.
Three years ago today I was sitting at my father’s bedside as he lay dying. I knew I was keeping a vigil: unlike when my mother died 15 years earlier, when I’d sat praying and hoping for her miraculous recovery, I knew Daddy was dying. At no point do I even remember praying that he would live. It seems odd to realize that now, as I sit here thinking about it. I was there to let him know that I loved him and simply to be with him as he moved toward his “homegoing.” I was calm, not frantic, sober, but not depressed. I felt very much like I was keeping watch. When he seemed to be lucid, I talked to him and told him I loved him; when he slept, I held his hand and watched him sleep. When I kissed him on the forehead and left the hospital late that night to go get some rest, I had not known that was the last time I would see him alive. He died the next morning: September 23, 2010.
I chronicled the events of that day in the blog I wrote on the one year anniversary of his passing. Last year, on the second anniversary, I was in the final stages of packing to move across the country to start my next great adventure. Tonight I find that I am quiet. I acknowledge my sadness as I mark the coming anniversary tomorrow, and think once again about the passage of time. I am grateful that I can look back on those last few days with my father with the normal sorrow of no longer having his physical presence in my life, without the added pain of regrets for all that I wish had been in terms of my relationship with him. At the end of the day he was not a perfect parent but I believe he did the best he could to be who each of his six children needed him to be. The possibility, indeed the likelihood that he fell short of the hopes and expectations that some of us had for him notwithstanding, I can look at who he was relative to me and my life and know that he did the best he could. For that I am grateful.
Many who knew my father highly regarded him as a confident, civically involved, man of the people. He gave speeches, rubbed shoulders with politicians, academics, clerics and lawmakers, and was himself a public figure who belonged to the community as much or more so than he belonged to his family. The relationship he had with each of us kids was as unique as we are from each other, though to be sure there were similarities.
At one point I was complaining to my therapist about how I felt like I had been “lost in the crowd,” that as the fifth of his six children–all of my siblings in one way or another were more special to my father than I was. My therapist took this in for a moment and then quietly reminded me that my father connected to me through my music. It was then that I remembered that my father had come once to hear me perform a few songs at a coffeehouse several years ago. And as I sat there and sang some of my original songs, I looked back at him and saw him singing the words along with me. I hadn’t known that he knew and remembered words to songs I’d written. The Christmas after my mother died he bought me a beautiful new classical guitar–it was the first and to this day the only new guitar I’ve ever had. Oh yes, my father knew who I was and appreciated my music. It was his way of saying, “I see you, Tee-Tah.”
I remain grateful for the life of my father and the life he gave to me. And I am deeply grateful that as he aged and as I matured and was willing to really look at who he was, I came to understand him and love him for who he was while he was still living. Tomorrow I will be celebrating his life in love and gratitude.
Dad and His Girls, Circa 2003
