Father's Day 2008

I approached Father's Day with mixed emotions. On the days before, my mind was filled with thoughts of conversations with my father and of father's days gone by. That said, each time I thought about my father or looked at a picture of him, I tried to balance it with thoughts of being a father and of my own children and how that fit into the bigger picture. Day to day existence is so often filled with the fine grains of sand, what's for breakfast, did the Cubs win, wow, the traffic sucks today, how much time is left in that ebay auction, that it is remarkably easy to lose sight of something that approaches the bigger picture. A life can be lived without one moment's thought to more than one moment's thought. The moments add up and periodically we ask "where did the time go?" We wonder how it is May 1 already, how it is 2008 already when it seems like The Police were just releasing an album yesterday not touring as a gray-haired retro disappointment. And in that context, I walked into my bedroom closet and retrieved the 8mm video cassette I had given the simple label "Dad 80th."

The background for the video is this. On my father's 80th birthday, I travelled to Fort Wayne in September 13, 2006 to share my father's birthday with him. The plan, one executed to perfection, was to drive from Fort Wayne to Huntington, Indiana
View Larger Map to try to find the many houses my father lived in during his childhood and to drive to nearby Wabash, Indiana to see the gravsite of his grandfather (my great-grandfather) Jacob Fogel.
View Larger Map.

I brought along camera and video camera. I figured out a way to place the video camera on the dashboard of my car so that I could keep it running throughout most of the drive and record our conversations. The tape rolled throughout the day and my belief was that I had recorded lots of nice moments. What I didn't do, was ever watch the tape from my father's 80th birthday until last weekend on Saturday night. In my sobbing, fever-laden eulogy, I referred to never having watched the tape. I didn't feel regret for not watching it, I frankly never wanted to watch while my father was alive. He asked me about it a couple times because he wanted to see it. I should have done that, but never did. We did share the photos of that day and that was nice.

Morbidly, I guess, I like the picture below of my father walking out of the cemetery where his grandfather is buried. My dad looked great that day. He wasn't especially sick that day, the start of dialysis was still 6 months away, and he was in fine spirits as we shared the day.

Back to last Saturday, hard to keep time straight here. Saturday was a great day, the sun shone, I knocked out 50 miles on my bike and then spent the day with the kids in various leisure time activities. Once the kids were in bed, my thoughts turned to father's day. I had decided I would look at the tape even though on no day recently had I even considered it. Part of the hesitation, I am certain, was due to my almost perfect memories of that day. Why spoil a memory with hard proof that things happened otherwise?

I put the tape in, sat on the floor of my darkened bedroom and suddenly was greeted by my alive father, seated in the passenger seat of my Prius telling me a story about his childhood. He was pointing out obscure sites along the way, not important sites, but genuinely obscure sites about a farmer who built a house on a hill above the Wabash River or about a relative or a news event from long ago. It didn't matter what he was saying the day it happened or as I watched. I sat in rapt attention as he spoke on screen. I kept thinking of questions I wanted to ask him as he spoke and felt what is an almost daily desire, the simple want to pick up the phone and call to say hello and ask how his day was going. All of it gone and yet there he was telling me about his memories (at age 12) of his grandfather's death, about his own father, Morris, crying at that time. There he was walking to a sign that talked about his high school, the sign planted in a park where the school once stood.

Though the feeling wasn't new, I was again filled with a profound sense of loss as I watched him on the screen. This was the first father's day since he died, well the next day would be, and as the screen went abruptly blue I felt the emptiness that goes with the loss. Not the immediate, aching mourning his death first brought and not the grieving these nearly 6 months have offered. Rather, this was a pain that really felt like emptiness. A realization, that I am left with lots of still photos, all sorts of memories that I can hope won't fade with time and this one short video where I didn't get him to say enough and, if I had watched it while he was still alive, I would have had the good sense to tape more, ask more and give myself a something meatier to hang onto. Not that it would have mattered, the emptiness is palpable and it won't go away.

Father's Day proper was joyful and joyous. I had a thought clearing run early in the morning, made chocolate chip pancakes for the kids, took them to the pool and generally laughed and basked in the glow of my own fatherhood. At my daughter's fourth grade music show, they sang a song with the line, "that's life, the heartache and the glory," and I can't put it better than that.