When my Dad’s health aide was working with him, back when he still had good days here and there, she would get him to engage in various art projects, some of which involved him drawing and painting – things he would never have done in his younger years, but which he took to with his usual precision and perfectionism, making sure each was just right. She also got him to work on letters to me, as she saw the letters I’d written coming in every week. One of these she gave to my Mom to mail many months ago, but my Mom had put it away in a bag and forgotten about it until it resurfaced the other week. She gave it to me when I last stopped by, and I put it on the passenger seat of my car as I left her house.
My first visit to Dad’s resting place was sadder than expected, and as I drove out of the cemetery I was feeling empty and forlorn. I couldn’t feel my father there, and I wasn’t ready to let him go. It left my heart aching and my head struggling to keep him alive somehow. Driving out of Amsterdam, I passed the same route we used to take to church on Sunday mornings and Christmas Eve. Those days and years felt far away, yet I still needed my Dad. As I drove over the bridge that connected the banks of the Mohawk River, the sun was nearing the end of its descent in the sky. Instead of taking the left to the Thruway, I continued on the road that would lead into the rural areas near Florida. This was the way to the veterinarian who used to treat our first dog, a German shepherd named Crystal that Dad had raised when she was only a puppy. That dog, like my father himself, would protect us religiously until the day she died, not allowing harm to come to any of us on her watch. There was still an animal hospital where the vet’s office once stood – a small comfort to know that some things carried on.
I started to feel my Dad’s presence again, on these back roads flooded with late afternoon sunlight, banked by fields of corn and the odd pumpkin patch. Super-saturated with the colors of autumn, this humble section of the world kept its beauty and its grace mostly to itself, content to simply exist and provide a backdrop to the scant intermittent parade of cars that sped in search of more exciting destinations. Turning onto a side street, I suddenly remembered the card my Mom had given to me. I pulled into the empty parking lot of a little library – closed for the day and empty at the late-afternoon hour – and slowly opened the envelope.
“Hi…” it said on the front, over a collection of birdhouses and their inhabitants. I knew my Dad hadn’t chosen the card, and yet somehow it came directly from him. I began crying a little – the simple declaration of ‘Hi’ felt like a message he managed to send in the most unexpected way, at the moment when I needed it the most. Inside, a generic message, “Hope everything’s going well in your little corner of the world!” was written above a picture of two birds near their home.
Beneath that, in a scrawl not far removed from that of a child, my Dad had valiantly attempted his signature, connecting his spirit to this page, connecting his heart to this letter – and a letter was always the way I connected to someone most profoundly. My Dad knew that, understanding and recognizing the love in all the letters I had written to him over the years, and in the occasional ones he would write back to me. In some ways, this last letter to me was probably not unlike my first letters to him. Our circle had been completed, and once completed, a circle continues on forever.
After feeling that my Dad wasn’t here anymore, I held a card he once held, a card that he meant to reach me, and I felt him near once again. He was in this letter, he was in my car, he was in the land and the sun and the sky and the trees. Mostly he was in my heart, and I felt the reassuring comfort of that, as if he was still here guiding and supporting and loving me.
A sense of gratitude washed over me then, whispering that it would be ok, reminding me that Dad would never truly leave my side.
