Now that he's gone, listening to Dad even more

Beverly Beckham writes a weekly column in the Boston Sunday Globe regional sections (the Northwest in my neck of the woods). Her writing is exceptional and deserves, I believe, a higher profile in the Morrissey Boulevard paper. Her choice of topics and how she handles them is never gives way to the temptation of the saccharine or the merely sentimental. This week's piece is true to form:

I tell people, only half in jest, that my father and I have never gotten along as well as we have in the past two years.

I listen to him now. I take his advice. I mull over his words. And I never interrupt.

When he was alive, he used to tell me all the time how I interrupted him. "My darling daughter, you're doing it again," he'd say. "I wasn't finished talking, and you're stepping all over my words." He believed this because he viewed comments such as, "No way!" "Really?" and "She did not!" as interruptions, while I perceived them as necessary interjections.
...

Two years ago, when he came home from Morton Hospital, I bought a fitted white sheet and a down comforter and two pillows for the bedroom his wife, Louise, had prepared for him, for the bed in which he would die.

I walked through the parking lot on that beautiful, late September day, the sun bright and warm, my arms heavy with bags, and I imagined my father young and my mother pregnant, shopping together for me - for small sheets and soft blankets and a tiny pillow. Carrying them back to my grandmother's where they lived, walking up the steps, making up the crib and standing back and anticipating their lives, so many years stretched out in front of them, so many wonderful dreams.

They would be hard years. And they wouldn't stretch as far as they hoped. But the mercy, the blessing, is they didn't know that then.

As I watched my father die, I thought about this, how you can never anticipate life or death, and that what looks like a long life when you're young seems so much shorter when seen through a rear view mirror.

From beginning to end is always too short a time.

And yet there is no end. In the Catholic funeral service, the priest says this. He comforts the mourners with the words, "Life doesn't end. It just changes."

These words are true.
...

He's gentler now. But still firm. And still instructing. "Get gas. Don't park the car on empty. There could be an emergency."

He's not a ghost like in "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." I don't see him. And I don't really hear him, either. Not with my ears.

But his words are real, not just a loop of his favorite sayings repeating themselves in my mind. He is current.

And his presence is not mere imagination.

Like rain that falls on the earth, or snow that blankets it, my father was present, visible, real to the touch. And now he's not.

But like rain and snow, like everything that was, he hasn't vanished. He's transformed. I don't understand what he is now. But I know that he is.

I feel him looking over my shoulder. I sense him beside me.
...

- Beverly Beckham, Boston Sunday Globe, October 7.

With little difficulty, Beckham might take over Garrison Keillor’s monologue from Lake Wobegon on Prairie Home Companion and she's a far better wordsmith than most preachers - and knows how to target the human heart, gently. Read the whole column here. You might not think of your dad but I won't be surprised if some loved one comes to mind, and heart.