This Father’s Day, in the After….

Father’s Day is complicated.

It will never cease to amaze me that this picture of my beaming husband, with his ever-present off-duty camera, was taken just ten weeks before he died. And that his (physician’s) heart knew it. His smile remained true while mine, at very best, merely quivered on the edge of despair.

I can only now see that I was literally incapable of facing straight ahead as he did.

That year, Father’s Day fell ten weeks after his death. For the first years I couldn’t even face special occasion greeting card displays in the drugstores which commanded my frequent trips as various injuries and ailments visited our household.

The next Father’s Day began in Belfast. In the day’s drenching early morning hours, I came close to creating an international incident while bringing his ashes to Northern Ireland. Four years later, on Father’s Day, my own father died. Ten Junes later, we gathered for his father‘s burial.

As I said, it’s a complicated Sunday.

As our children have gone off to school and dispersed, I’ve often spent the day alone, always outside, as he would have liked to be. We’ll do that today, too, whether the sky stays clear or not.

I’ll continue mourning the absence of his guidance and wisdom and kindness, most of all for our children but also for the endless friends and patients and strangers his presence on the planet would have continued to make better in the decades he should have had with us.

I’ll ache for the absence of the look he’d have had as he photographed a full solar eclipse and a blazing aurora he could have seen just outside our old yellow house in New England.

I’ll feel sorry for myself, for the absence of the unpierced heart and unvanquished hope I once had.

And I’ll be thankful because I still hear and see and feel him in every full and empty and in-between space.