June 16, 2024

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

     Father’s Day brings celebration for the living but also for the memory of those who have passed. With the latter, your glasses now seem polished, the lenses sharp. You recollect what you failed to see when your dad was with you. That  has a good side, for if there is an afterlife, fathers hear you.

     Some years ago, as my Dad lie dying in hospital and I on my way to visit while he could still speak and not yet in the induced coma that would let him pass, with the angels already beside him, I realized as I walked on that beautifully shaded sidewalk on a glorious spring day that he was no longer next to me. And I needed to hold his hand.

     It had been ages since I did that, and not much then, fathers and sons being what they were in the 1940s, ’50s. Yet I would hold his hand many times metaphorically after young childhood: When I was sick, for one of his many careers was as a licensed practical nurse; when I had a nightmare, and he came to me; when my mother chased me, a teen, about the house with a broom, and he offered understanding; when I was learning to drive; most of all when I had the occasional momentary desire to be very young again without much to worry me.

     As we grew, the two of us – distinct personalities –  clashed, and the wall that can rise between father and son did so. It would take decades of having my own family and two sons better in all ways than me to realize my father was truly doing his best. It would take his passing and the years since to understand and absorb the fullness of his well-met responsibility.

     Oh, how I would hold his hand now. 

     Happy Father’s Day to all.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. This essay is reworked from a previous one.

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