Tag: Father’s Day

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.

Father’s Day overlooking New Hampshire’s White Mountains, from the Castle in the Clouds

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.

Newburyport MA (c)S.M. Glennon

Looking Over

The more rarefied the vantage point, the rarer (and hence ordinarily overlooked) is the view.

I once followed waterfalls, hiking through woods to a mountaintop garden in New Hampshire’s Ossippee Mountain Range. The mountains were rendered in green at street level, but bathed in bright blue from on high.

This rose stretched exuberantly at the Castle in the Clouds that Father’s Day. Like an outgoing youngest child in a large family, it launched itself above its brethren and refused to be overlooked.

It was not so very far from Mt. Washington, which my husband and I had tried to climb on our 15th wedding anniversary. Ultimately we had to give up on seeing the sights from the highest vantage point in New Hamspshire available to mere mortals. I had insufficient ballast, and was no match for fierce winds across a broad open expanse of rock. It was too difficult to hold onto my steady spouse, and I was nearly swept off the mountain’s face.

(The nearby Mt. Washington Hotel is sometimes mistaken for a very different overlook: The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel; I can assure you the White Mountains’ version is far more serene).

Sometimes I have found myself in thinner air, overlooking a golden world as the sun sets. Or walking through seas of swirling pastel clouds atop Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain, taking in the Northeast’s crown view of a rising sun.

In more recent years, I’ve looked over land and sea and sandscapes from atop camels and towering dunes. From watchtowers and volcanic islands. I’ve surveyed ancient blue and pink cities and violet seas from slitted holes in stone castles and fortresses.

From a distance of many years, I realize I’ve found myself climbing ever-farther upwards on such days.

At dizzying heights, I feel closer to my missing piece. He frequently took photos from such spots when he was here with us, on “earth, our heaven, for a while.” Words I read from Mary Oliver’s “A Pretty Song” at his service.

In some ways, we can best see what we’re missing from on high. Where the heady view is also heavenly.

A man looking out over the City of Lights with his daughters, not knowing it would be the last time. The same man on a Equatorial island cliff, knowing it was for the last time, and seeing the rarest of Pacific nesting birds.

One of my children recently told me of Sgùrr Dearg, where we earthbound folks may survey both very present Puffins and great swaths of the visible world from the Inaccessible Pinnacle.

If she climbs it someday, I hope she’ll send me a picture of what she overlooks.

Now Face West

This is the tenth Father’s Day that has dawned for my children without their father here with them.  This year, they all are also separated from each other, occupying different spaces on two continents.

Seven years have passed since we brought his ashes to billow into an underwater cloud at Northern Ireland’s northernmost point.

And, strangely, it is just four years since my own father died on Father’s Day , after living to teach generations of students and be a grandfather to young adults.

I am a theoretical physicist’s daughter: I understand chaotic progression cannot be undone. But I can’t help feeling the world might seem a little less profoundly disordered were they here now.

I don’t usually remember to look behind me, but this time I did.  The color there was gentle, the clouds swirling and soft, without the hard bright edges of the too-bright-to-behold sun being delivered squalling into the horizon for the day ahead. 

Sometimes looking back is uncomplicated and beautiful.  

Happy Father’s Day.

Father’s Day 2020