It’s been a while since I’ve felt Dad near me. I still think of him every day, not as intensely or as all-encompassing a way as a year ago, but he’s still here. Lately he’s felt somewhat distant, or maybe I’m just focusing on other things and giving grief a break. The past few weeks I’ve missed him a little more than usual, and I hadn’t received any signs or signals that he was near.
Yesterday I woke late and was puttering about the living room when the familiar tune of ‘Lara’s Theme’ from one of his favorite movies ‘Dr. Zhivago’ came over the radio. Immediately I felt Dad near me, and I stopped to listen. I would play this song right after he died as I drove through the backroads near Amsterdam where he must have driven half a century ago. So far from his homeland, it was my homeland, and it’s always signified my father to me.
Later in the day, I was making motions to clean up the guestroom. Sorting through old letters and playbills and photos, I found an unopened letter addressed to ‘Allen’, which I recognized at once as the writing of one of Dad’s caretakers. She would occasionally write out a card with whatever he had said that day, and sometimes he would do his best to sign it – the handwriting a touching work of child-like scrawling, but glimmers of Dad’s penmanship would show through, even to the end when it was mostly abstract squiggles.
The letter I found hadn’t been opened – it was sealed with a sticker of a blue jay, and as I ripped it open I realized it was a message from my father even though he was gone. It tugged at my heart and I cried a little, going back to the time when it would have been written – in the sunny and warm days of his final spring. On the front was a painted beach scene of summer. Inside, in his caretaker’s handwriting, his words rang clear, if confused: “Where are you? Can you turn off the sun? It’s too sunny! It’s too hot to write any more.”
Maybe it was dementia-addled gibberish, or maybe it was clarity and wisdom from an expert – for the last couple of years Dad could go either way. On this day, when I had been missing him so, it was a glimpse of warmth and comfort in a snowy winter. I was still somewhere between smarting at the memory and being grateful to have it.
Going through more photos, I stumbled across one of us at the beach. I am now almost the same age as my father was in this picture, and my godson is almost the age that I must have been here. There are echoes of him in the little boy I used to be.
The tears come a bit more, and I let them fall, strangely welcoming their testament to how much I miss him. When I find a tissue and collect myself, I check my phone and there’s a message from Andy – a video of a cardinal chirping in sunlight. He hadn’t known I was crying and missing Dad, but he somehow got the idea to send it to me at that moment.
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