thinking of my dad

Yesterday afternoon I was working on a short piece for the Listening Hearts newsletter. I sat staring at the computer screen, rethinking what exactly I wanted to say, feeling a bit stuck. I thoughtlessly packaged my third piece of stale chewing gum in its wrapper and popped a fourth fresh one in my mouth. I was struck by a strange feeling. Not quite deja vu exactly - something else, something familiar.

Then I had a vision, a scene from 1992 or 1993. Through the glass doors leading into his sunny study, I see my dad hunched over his computer screen, chewing away as he writes his sermon. Thursdays were sermon-writing days, and as he wrote my ex-smoker ex-drinker of a dad would go through 6 bottles of Perrier, or 3 packs of gum (murder on the jaws, as I am discovering) or a bag of apples slathered in peanut butter. His study was a hodge podge of books and papers and kid art all over the walls. There was a lumpy corduroy couch in the middle of the room to provide a cozy spot for mulling things over. Or napping. And it was the perfect quiet spot for a bookish teenager to stretch out with a novel, listening to the gum snap behind her head.

I looked down and half-expected to be wearing the enormous old gray cardigan my mother made for him many, many years ago, the one that became his housecoat.

But that is impossible, because he was buried in it fourteen years ago. The anniversary of his death is this Monday. Every year I feel its approach as the seasons shift. The snow melts, crocuses poke through, and his presence in my heart and mind grows stronger. Often, I dream about him. Every year I feel it a little differently, but inevitably I am compelled to go back to those last days my mother, father, sister and I had together in 1996. I have told and retold myself the story of his death so many times it has made a little rut all its own in my mind. (I learned this week that in the church calendar, saints' days are always commemorated on the day of their death, rather than birth. This resonates for me, very much.)

This year, this new writing work has brought me into some continuity with him, a lost thread pulled out of my back pocket and gripped now in my palm. My adult self, the one he only lived long enough to catch a tiny twinkling of, is trying on some of his old habits. I didn't even realize it, until I sat there with my open pack of gum in front of the computer, staring at the wall of kid art Mike has assembled in his hodge podge of a papa study downstairs.

I wrote a little while ago about my children imitating me, and wondering about what habits of mine will stick and become a part of them. Every night as I put Frances to bed I look at the bulletin board of special people she has on her wall, and since writing that post I noticed that my mother and I have our heads angled in just the same way, with just the same little smile on our faces, in our respective photographs. Her picture was taken at Frances's second birthday party and mine is from the day Gabriel was born. I have my arms around my two babies. Is there such a thing as peaceful ecstasy? That is what I was feeling, next to Mike on the hospital bed. Maybe - in a less intense way - that was what my mom was feeling too on that sunny June afternoon nearly three years ago in our Lancaster backyard.

It is mysterious and beautiful, isn't it? Maybe I will get to know my dad better, doing some of the things he used to do. That would be an unexpected gift. It's funny, I experienced this in my last job too. As a social worker in Lancaster, I ended up meeting and working with so many people who knew and loved my dad. I didn't anticipate that happening either, feeling closer to him through my work. But I did. And now, in a different way, I do again.

Am I following him around?

If I am, that's okay with me. Here is a consoling thought: my kids might know him more intuitively through me and my work. Maybe one day I will catch Frances tilting her head and smiling in just the same way my mother and I apparently do. Maybe years from now I will walk into Gabriel's room and he will be eating compulsively, writing a term paper. Hopefully I won't give him a hard time about eating the entire bag of pretzels. Hopefully I'll feel grateful for the glimmer of my dad that lives in us.