A Photo in the Morning.

An essay I had no intention of writing.

Feb 15, 2024

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I am in my basement with my dogs. I had no intention of writing a Substack post. Five drafts were almost ready, and I could pull up one. , but five

My morning plan was to rise early and enjoy the early morning with my sleeping dogs at my feet. I would read the newspaper that my faithful delivery man, Yokan, never fails to leave at the base of our now lightly snow-dusted driveway.

But something has come up.

In the early morning, my daughter messaged me a photo of her as a child, sitting on my dad’s lap. The two of them pulled the rear string on a Paddington Bear and listened to Paddington Bear sing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head.” Paddington had his Wellingtons on; it had to be about rain.

This photo.

I could not help but pause. My grief is no longer roaring, but tears well up. I thought that the last batch of tears would be my last. No.

Most of my posts here are constructions, trying to examine a point from a different angle, achieve moral clarity, celebrate the freedom of self-deprecation, break cliches with a big hammer, and celebrate weakness—because we bond through such shared gifts.

However, such gifts are best unpackaged and of little monetary value; we come together through those quiet moments, those slivers of honesty that stick in others’ hearts. We don’t bond when our time together is just a mutual exchange of the packaged, well-wrapped, and curated rendering of ourselves. This essay is certainly the former.

Trip to my father's grave.

And this brings me back to the photo. My daughter is 18 now; it must have been about 16 years ago. I am not good at estimating age from old pictures.

It is hard to look at; my father died suddenly about two and a half years ago. While I should have been ready, I was not ready. My dad loved his grandchildren. My sister had four boys, my brother had two boys, I have Sophia and my son Vanya. Sophia was the only girl in the bunch.

Sophia loved her grandfather.

At the end of February, it will be two years since Sophia and I flew across Canada with no purpose other than to lay flowers on my father’s grave on the first anniversary of his death. We purposely got the earliest flight, told few people, did not multitask our trip, and did not combine it with business or visits to relatives.

We left the plane and walked briskly to the rental car company. Soon, we were driving south, stopping at a flower shop in High River, Alberta. I told the flower lady why we were there, and she didn’t seem to care, but that was okay.

I think our pains are largely unknowable by strangers.

I do not condemn her for not offering up platitudes to the stranger in the long coat who said he was there for his father. We drove into Vulcan, AB; I had been there thousands of times, down Main Street, past Wolfe Hardware, the store that had been there for 100 years, past the Royal Cafe, the typical Chinese-owned small prairie town cafe.

Memory and time are curious; perhaps at some point, memory must be subjugated to time, but sitting there three years ago with my dad, it comes up so easily in memory, so crisp, not faded, and the corners of the image are perfect.

My father, though a mathematician and a man who researched areas my feeble mind could never understand, was not given to chat; it was rare that he would scrape the veneer of the banal to show snapshots of his heart. He was quiet.

What was it like for him at 88 to have so many funerals, to have so many dear friends die, to lose his wife, his mother and his father, all within two years?

I will never know. Maybe Dad was not a great communicator, but he tried; he wanted to be together and never pushed me away. He read his books in the living room, did not mind being interrupted, and did not run away.

But of course, he was not raised in the age where he had to have an office; his room didn’t even have a desk. So much of our time together was spent reading, but still his presence; it was his form of love; it was spartan perhaps, but it was there, and I miss it.

In the photo he sits patiently with Sophia, his precious granddaughter. There is a string on Paddington Bear's back, and he pulls it for her repeatedly; he does not say too much, but she enjoys his presence as much as he delights in his tiny granddaughter.

On our anniversary trip to his grave, we go to the end of Main Street, turn right, past the airstrip, and cruise by the snow-covered golf course. The Vulcan Cemetery has an iron-wrought gate over it, and we pass underneath.

I know that one of my great uncles, buried here, was born before the American Civil War. My mother has been there for almost 40 years. But it dawned on me that the graves are flat stones, the snow is deep, and I am not sure where my dad’s grave is. So I called my sister, who looked up the cemetery map online. It helped a little and steered us to the back corner.

I am wearing street shoes and only have a windshield brush. Sophia stands back and watches me wipe the snow off the grave tops. The sun is bright, bouncing off the snow, and I squint. I wonder for an instant if I will be here all day looking for my father’s grave, but I swear that no matter what, we will not pass under that wrought iron gate without laying our flowers. We came for him; why would we leave without finding him?

Standing in the middle of a winter cemetery, I tried to remember what tree was near my mother’s grave. Dad is by her, of course. Was it near the shed, just off the gravel cemetery road? I am not sure. But I am standing on someone’s grave. I just casually figure I might as well clean it while I am there.

It was my father’s grave. H.C. Finlayson.

I weep no more than now; I turn, and Sophia is standing shaking and crying, her composure broken by grief. I walk to her, and neither of us says anything. I just awkwardly hug her. I love my daughter; my pain is now not grief but sadness at her tears.

We clean the grave together and leave the flowers. I know it is foolish. They will be covered soon, blown away, and will not last. We get in the car and drive slowly down the narrow gravel cemetery road, turn left, out under the gate and head back north.

I should have known he would end up here and I would visit, but a remnant of shock clings to me. But we must push on; life moves forward. I look at Sophia; she is composed again. We drive silently toward Calgary, and we are together; it is a blessing. We don’t say much; there is no need.