but it's not with the same intensity as I miss my mom. Recently, I've started to dig into the why's of that just a bit. His death certainly wasn't as wrenching; by the time he died, he was retired and living in Arizona, and I saw him at most once a year; talked maybe three or four times beyond that.
He was just 69 when he died - old enough to have lived a good life, young enough that he never got to be old. The week he died, he'd visited me in Kansas City on his way to Maria's wedding, then stopped in Iowa to see my brother. He died of a heart attack in his sleep. This may well be part of the lack-of-intensity-why - he didn't suffer, he just went to bed and forgot to wake up.
These past few months, as I haven't been working at a job, his voice keeps coming back to me.
I hear him finishing my bedroom when I was eight or nine - and making a common cutting mistake; he cut the mirror image he wanted of the paneling he was installing. Rather than getting upset, he calmly matched his cut and installed the board, telling me, "the important part is not that you never make a mistake, it's that you know how to fix it."
I see him fixing the old lead drainage pipe, embedded in the concrete floor of the second story bath in my old house. "That should hold for a while", he said, "just don't try to poke anything down it". It did - for at least another fifteen years.
I hear his voice telling me evenly, after I told him I was thinking of getting a divorce (when I was young, divorce was not considered one of the options within a marriage; I feared his disapproval.), "I can't tell you what to do here - you need to do what you need to do."
When he arrived for that last visit, he and my step-mother had just had a fight and hadn't quite resolved it. It seems she was upset about something, and was having her say. He was quietly nodding along, and she was fine with his nodding until he nodded in the wrong place. It was then she found he had turned off his hearing aids, and couldn't really hear what she was saying at all. She was still a tad bit upset; he just admitted being in the wrong with a small half-smile that told me he wasn't really sorry.
Yeah, I miss you, Dad.
Happy Father's Day.
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