Father's Day...

I've heard it said that a boy never really becomes a man until his father dies. There is some truth to that but it seems a high price to pay.

It has been over 13 years since my father died while on a business trip in Chicago. He had had at least one heart attack he had simply walked through, another that put him in the hospital, and the third one that took his life. My mom was at our house, which they had helped us buy, just a day after we closed on it and was starting to paint and get things ready. That meant that I was the one who had to give her the news.

On the way I remember being upset with God about his death. It wasn't so much that it wasn't expected. For years I had thought that one day I would get that late night call with the news of his passing. It just seemed like the wrong time, too soon, very much to soon.

My father seemed to have spent much of his adult life angry at how the world was, or maybe how it treated him, or how things never quite lived up to expectations. We always had food, and clothing, and more than enough (something he didn't have as a child) but the cost was living on pins and needles and wondering what kind of person was coming home from work that night. I suspect it was hard on him as well.

And when you're a child you don't understand. All you see is the person as they are in front of you at that moment and you haven't yet developed the skills to see through time and view the picture from a distance. Context is everything when you relate to people and I had no context other than the fear that something I would do or say or maybe even never had done would get me hit. It can be a harsh way to live.

But it was, in retrospect, not all dark. There were those wonderful nights when dad would come home from work and take us, one at a time, to my uncle's cabin near Tomahawk, Wisconsin to fish with a stop at the Dairy Queen on the way home. There was the day I remember him running next to me and then letting go as I rode my bike without training wheels for the very first time. There were Saturday nights at the YMCA with popcorn and a whole 16 ounce bottle of pop all for myself. I remember Sunday afternoon drives following church and driving out in the country after dark looking for deer. Dad cried sometimes on Sunday mornings when a song or hymn touched him and I'm sure that he probably wanted to be in heaven long before he actually died because Earth was sometimes pretty hard on him.

That's all the stuff I found out later, how he didn't really have a father himself, and times were tough, and the only way to get to college was by being a Marine. Although I never met her his mother seemed harsh and yet he still sent a good chunk of his enlisted man's salary home so she could live. I suspect that all haunted him and we lived with those ghosts as well. Dad saved money by riding a bike to work and then found a way to go back to college while working full time and caring for a family. Looking back I don't wonder at all why he sometimes came home, had supper, and almost immediately fell asleep on the couch.

There comes a time when you stop seeing your parents with the heroic eyes of a child or the scoffing vision of a teenager. It's a time when you see them warts and all as people who tried hard and made mistakes sometimes and were often shaped by forces beyond their control, things that you had no idea existed in the shelter of youth. By the time I reached my early thirties most of the pain had already died away. I was who I was and so was he.

And yet in those same years I saw a change in my father. I saw the goodness that had been inside of him, that something that made my mother fall in love with him and broke through as the sun set on the lake while we paddled silently for shore. I saw it emerge in a way that somehow had eluded him as the years passed. Call it grace, call it age, call it a man who had defined himself by duty now finally realizing the value of who we was and not just what he could do. I don't know what it all was but I do know it was good.

I wanted more, but time and health and work and this weary old world had done their damage and more was not to be had. So on Father's Day I'm grateful for every moment in the sun, for what glimpses I was given, for the grace that lead my father safely home. And I mourn what could have been, those gracious years when sons and fathers leave the tumultuous growing pains behind and sit next to each other in a boat fishing without words.