The Grief That Lingers: A Son's Lament for His Lost Father.

To Everything a Season, and Not All Things Must Fit to Belong

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As my father aged, I told myself that one day he would not be here. I would have to be ready. I had lost my mother when I was twenty, but it was a slow death; from 10th grade on, she, despite her fighting spirit in the face of cancer, was dying.¹

With cancer, does grief bleed off with time? By the time they pass, has most of the grief drained off? Perhaps my memory of the grief for my mother is fractured by the prism of time, or the distortions of aspirational memory. Still, I assumed my father's death would hit me like my mother's had, but it did not.

It moved in ways sorrow is not said to move.

No tempest, no tearing of veils—only a slow submergence. It did not strike; it settled, like ash upon still water. It crept in behind the silence, where no keening² could reach, and made its dwelling in small abandonments: the cup unwashed, the spine of a book untouched by breath, the chair that leaned forever toward his ghost.

When Mum died in 1986, my father’s friend in Minnesota came to my dormitory to notify me. My friends and I had been drinking beer, not allowed at a Lutheran College, but the knock at the door put an end to that.

“Your mum died at 4:15.” His words hung in the air. I turned to my friends, their eyes wide, no one could breathe.

My friends were sympathetic, but I was soon alone, standing in the bitterly cold courtyard of Concordia College.

Indeed, I wanted to be cold, not as some masochistic punishment, but so the physical environment would match my spirit.

My mother and I had agreed that I would say goodbye and not lose my semester. Perhaps, as the Bible says, because God has put eternity on the hearts of men, part of me hoped there would be some glorious last-minute reprieve. There was not.

My dad did not say much; he was a quiet mathematician, a skilled but infrequent painter, and a man who could fix anything. He was never happier than when on his back, repairing our old Massey Harris tractor at the farm, a piece of cardboard protecting him from the driveway gravel bed.

In fifth grade, he helped me with my science project, and that year I went to the provincials and took gold. It was my presentation, given every few hours to a new panel of judges, but it was my father’s convictions and teachings that gave me the strength.

Dad did not say much when I arrived home for Mum’s funeral; I don't remember how I walked into our old Winnipeg house. I remember seeing her handwriting in the phone directory, the handwritten recipes; they made me wince with grief.

Still, the funeral passed, and we called what was left behind ‘a family.’ We were stuck with each other, and we had to do family things.

I believe you grieve for what never was, as much as you grieve for what was lost. For my mother, I grieved the former, for my dad the latter.

In the years that followed, I would fly into Winnipeg, sometimes with my entire family, sometimes with just my daughter, Sophia, sometimes alone. The Winnipeg house still was tainted by grief and loss, but as I said before, it was the former, not the latter.

When I came home to visit Dad, he and I would drive from Winnipeg to my sister’s farm in Emerson, MB.

In later years, Dad always had me drive. He delighted in his four nephews - all boys - with a big hug at the door for Grandpa, and an awkward nod to the uncle.

It strengthened me seeing how the nephews loved their grandfather; in later years, as each grandson progressed through the University of Manitoba, they would live with him at our Sandra Bay home. When I was away in Toronto, it comforted me knowing that someone was there for him.

My dad was like me, not quite a perfect fit, a handle that would stick. To much of the world, something with us was always a bit askew; it wasn't like he didn't belong - we all belong - but some are a bit off, many believe this off space is where the creative soul is stored. But Dad and I sometimes would fit perfectly; we just needed to find our space.

Dad was a professor at the University of Manitoba and taught until 2000. I remember his office fondly; it was his space, as well as the faculty lounge across the hallway. But after he retired, his space was the living room at our family home in Winnipeg.

As he sat on his 1970’s floral couch, consumed in another book, the quilt my mother had knitted so many years ago would be wrapped around his feet that rested on a small burgandy footrest.

When I was back in Winnipeg, I would sit nearby in the plush blue chair, reading magazines that had been gifted to my dad. I, like him, was one of those bad joints, not perfectly snug, but when I was with Dad, the joint was tight. I belonged like a mortise and tenon joint cut from the same grain—solid, balanced, needing no glue.

At night, if I woke up too early, I would stop by my dad’s door to hear a breath. My dad had sawed off the top of the pale blue homemade bunk bed in my old room, which he had made into his own. After his wife died, he could not return to his marriage bed.

In the summers, Dad and I would travel from Winnipeg to Vulcan, Alberta, and back to our farmhouse, the white house near where my grandfather had started farming in the 1920s. Grandpa’s yellow house, not much of a house, reputedly the union of two old grain bins, with an entrance at the end of a long pathway of boards my twin brother and I had nailed on to the supporting two-by-fours one hot Alberta summer, was long gone. Dad and my uncle had to burn it down; it was crumbling and a magnet for vandals. I knew that hurt Dad; it was like cutting a cord to his prairie childhood.