To all of you who are or have fathers, may you have a happy day. For those of you who are fathers, may it be completely happy in Aristotle's sense from the post just below.
I suppose we were all too busy having a wonderful time with our families to comment, but it was a wonderful day. It was our first without my father, and his memory has been a great blessing, and in that I take great solace. I hope that's true for all those of you whose fathers have passed on.
I miss my father a great deal, but I am aware that I would never have become a man if he had not passed on. This is something Freud apparently said, and it is true: you don't know how much weight your father is carrying for you until he's gone, and you have to pick it up yourself.
Then you find out about all the weight he was carrying for everybody else, because they all come to you to ask for help with it. Only then do you really become a man in the fullest sense.
Yes, that is true. Dad was somewhat limited in his last few years, but Mom was the one picking up the slack and taking care of him. When he passed she finally started letting us take care of things for her, and we'd promised Dad we'd always take care of her, and it was the only thing that mattered to him in his later days. Even so, the realization that he's not there as a fallback anymore, even to talk to is sobering indeed.
I suppose we were all too busy having a wonderful time with our families to comment, but it was a wonderful day. It was our first without my father, and his memory has been a great blessing, and in that I take great solace. I hope that's true for all those of you whose fathers have passed on.
ReplyDeleteI miss my father a great deal, but I am aware that I would never have become a man if he had not passed on. This is something Freud apparently said, and it is true: you don't know how much weight your father is carrying for you until he's gone, and you have to pick it up yourself.
ReplyDeleteThen you find out about all the weight he was carrying for everybody else, because they all come to you to ask for help with it. Only then do you really become a man in the fullest sense.
Yes, that is true. Dad was somewhat limited in his last few years, but Mom was the one picking up the slack and taking care of him. When he passed she finally started letting us take care of things for her, and we'd promised Dad we'd always take care of her, and it was the only thing that mattered to him in his later days. Even so, the realization that he's not there as a fallback anymore, even to talk to is sobering indeed.
ReplyDelete