Take one if you miss your dad too.
Showing posts with label dad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dad. Show all posts
Sunday, June 21, 2026
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Saturday, November 16, 2024
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Monday, November 16, 2015
Thursday, November 20, 2014
A Part Of Me, Blurry But Still There
“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.”
--Meghan O’Rourke
--Meghan O’Rourke
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
"Snap"
Snap
It’s a specialty, a trick I like to do.
I stand with a relative, a friend, a pet,
bend the camera lens back,
point it in our direction,
center the unseen frame around us and
push the button.
Snap.
Moments recorded—a laugh, a guffaw,
tenderness. The picture may stop but
we go on.
2001: I stand next to my father on top of
an impossibly thin tower, twenty stories high.
From it we can see the relentless expanse of
the central Florida lake country.
“Dad, come here…”
“Huh?” he replies. He has been losing
his hearing at an alarming rate lately.
His hands shake too.
“Come here, to the edge, I want to take a picture of us.”
“Oh, okay.”
The wind blows our hair and we can
see for miles, even the house he will
live in, the house he will take his life in.
I am 38.
Snap.
2002: I kneel down next to my mom in
her favorite peach wingback chair.
Chemo and radiation have left her bald and thin.
The regret, the resignation, the despair,
the quiet fear is omnipresent in her eyes.
I point the camera at us—and something else,
nameless… not my father’s ghost but
something far worse: the empty space he left us.
I am 39.
Snap.
2003: I stand in the half-light by the glass doors.
I have had a tooth removed but the area
is not healing. I have what dentists call “dry socket”—
and it hurts. My face, puffy and distended on
one whole side gazes into the lens.
Today is my birthday.
All around me is empty space, shimmering, swollen.
I am an orphan, alone. They will never get
to see me turn 40.
Snap.
© JEF 2006
It’s a specialty, a trick I like to do.
I stand with a relative, a friend, a pet,
bend the camera lens back,
point it in our direction,
center the unseen frame around us and
push the button.
Snap.
Moments recorded—a laugh, a guffaw,
tenderness. The picture may stop but
we go on.
2001: I stand next to my father on top of
an impossibly thin tower, twenty stories high.
From it we can see the relentless expanse of
the central Florida lake country.
“Dad, come here…”
“Huh?” he replies. He has been losing
his hearing at an alarming rate lately.
His hands shake too.
“Come here, to the edge, I want to take a picture of us.”
“Oh, okay.”
The wind blows our hair and we can
see for miles, even the house he will
live in, the house he will take his life in.
I am 38.
Snap.
2002: I kneel down next to my mom in
her favorite peach wingback chair.
Chemo and radiation have left her bald and thin.
The regret, the resignation, the despair,
the quiet fear is omnipresent in her eyes.
I point the camera at us—and something else,
nameless… not my father’s ghost but
something far worse: the empty space he left us.
I am 39.
Snap.
2003: I stand in the half-light by the glass doors.
I have had a tooth removed but the area
is not healing. I have what dentists call “dry socket”—
and it hurts. My face, puffy and distended on
one whole side gazes into the lens.
Today is my birthday.
All around me is empty space, shimmering, swollen.
I am an orphan, alone. They will never get
to see me turn 40.
Snap.
© JEF 2006
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
...
My Parents, Who Are Crying
They drive across a vast, empty plane
that tilts back and forth
like a carnival ride.
They are driving while
all around them
shrieks and reels
the wide open universe,
the horrible, unending universe,
screaming, roaring,
so much empty space,
shimmering,
indifferent,
numbing.
They are small and
vulnerable like china dolls
as the maroon car
speeds on, buffeted by
wind and the terrain,
stalked by danger,
easy victims.
I only see them from the back.
Their bodies rock,
knocked about inside the cab,
their heads loll left to right,
right to left.
My father’s hands
frozen to the wheel,
mistrusting, hating no one
more than himself,
pretending not to
regret all the things
he never did;
my mother, immobile, resolute,
so full of bitterness and
rage that, if she could
pull herself apart, if she could
slice herself open with her
own fingernails, if she could
reach in and wrench her
heart out, beating, dripping,
she would:
they are crying about it all.
Where is the end?
Ssssshh. Keep driving.
Just look ahead.
Everything is going to be all right.
JEF 1993
They drive across a vast, empty plane
that tilts back and forth
like a carnival ride.
They are driving while
all around them
shrieks and reels
the wide open universe,
the horrible, unending universe,
screaming, roaring,
so much empty space,
shimmering,
indifferent,
numbing.
They are small and
vulnerable like china dolls
as the maroon car
speeds on, buffeted by
wind and the terrain,
stalked by danger,
easy victims.
I only see them from the back.
Their bodies rock,
knocked about inside the cab,
their heads loll left to right,
right to left.
My father’s hands
frozen to the wheel,
mistrusting, hating no one
more than himself,
pretending not to
regret all the things
he never did;
my mother, immobile, resolute,
so full of bitterness and
rage that, if she could
pull herself apart, if she could
slice herself open with her
own fingernails, if she could
reach in and wrench her
heart out, beating, dripping,
she would:
they are crying about it all.
Where is the end?
Ssssshh. Keep driving.
Just look ahead.
Everything is going to be all right.
JEF 1993
Friday, November 16, 2012
Eleven years ago today...
1939 - 2001
The Night My Father Left His Life
The fifteen-foot walk to the shed took hours,
hiking alone with his back to the house,
to his cats he fed for the last time,
to me driving through the mountains
three thousand miles away,
to my mother behind him,
next to him, asleep inside him.
The air was cool. It was night.
Stars were shining silver-white,
the ground sighed as his feet sunk
into the soft wet cushion of green grass.
He did not see colors.
He turned the handle, did not hear
the click or the whoosh of the door.
This is the night he destroyed himself.
He removed his glasses, set them down carefully,
took his place on the floor and
fumbled in the dark with the gun.
His final walk, his glasses,
his breath coming short and scared,
his finger, the ripping sound
tearing through the still darkness—
all of this, his final gift to me
as I, from a cold beach,
watched meteors streak
through the sky.
©JEF 2005
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Ten years ago today...
Meteors
As we circle the sun
on the same course,
we return to
the same point.
We’re moving but
the meteors aren’t.
We pass through them, the
remains of Tempel-Tuttle.
It’s night in November.
I’m on a beach,
my father in a shed.
I look up.
He looks down.
I raise binoculars.
He raises a gun.
The stars, a streak.
The gun, a flash.
These fragments of comets.
He is leaving us
to become a fragment
streaking across the sky,
joining a different orbit,
joining the Leonids,
his new family, his new home
as I spin around the sun,
as the stars spin around us,
as we all spin in a circle.
©JEF 2011
Ten weeks after the World Trade Center towers were attacked and destroyed, my father put a rifle to his left temple and took his life. He shot himself for reasons not associated with the towers, but because these two enormous losses came so close together, they intertwined in my mind at the time.
News stories followed the bigger public tragedy while I tried to assemble information and make sense of my personal tragedy.
In the weeks and months after the towers were brought down, those who had been in them, and who were now missing, were presumed dead. But I recall a news story then about one such man, presumed dead in the destruction, who turned up at his home in New Jersey after wandering for several weeks with trauma-induced amnesia. Imagine the shock, the relief his family felt. It must have seemed like a literal miracle: someone’s son, husband, father, turned up from the grave. Deep inside me, I felt that if it happened there, maybe it could happen here.
Much like the relatives of those destroyed in the towers, I did not see my father’s death or his body. He killed himself in Florida; I live on the opposite edge of the continent. I was told of his suicide but could not experience or absorb it firsthand, couldn’t see it for myself. So I began dreaming that my father was still alive and there had just been some kind of odd error. In one of these dreams, my father interrupted a burglar. A fight ensued, someone was shot, and a body was found… but it turned out to be the thief. My father remained missing. Perhaps he fled in fear of being found guilty of killing someone. On the television news, I watched a reporter speak from my parents’ backyard about the break-in, the struggle, the death, and my father who disappeared into the forest of Florida pines behind their property.
In another dream, I encountered my still-living father wandering through a desert, suffering from amnesia. He had no memory of his suicide attempt, no recollection of how he got so far from home, and no knowledge of how to get back. Around this time, there was another heart-breaking news story about a fourteen year old boy somewhere in the northeast who ran away from his mother and abusive step-father after years of being severely beaten and starved. He knew his biological father lived in central Florida, but not the exact city. Somehow this young man got to Florida and went door to door in search of his father or anyone who might know his father. He showed up, emaciated, dehydrated, suffering from exposure and his beatings, on the doorstep of someone who took him in. The boy’s father was found and contacted but by then it was too late. The boy died of his condition before the father could reach him.
In my imagination, in my dreams, in my psyche, I wondered if my poor father was suffering from amnesia, dehydration and exposure, had left central Florida and reached California…going door to door, trying to find his son. My father needed me. I had to find him, rescue him. But where was he?
As we circle the sun
on the same course,
we return to
the same point.
We’re moving but
the meteors aren’t.
We pass through them, the
remains of Tempel-Tuttle.
It’s night in November.
I’m on a beach,
my father in a shed.
I look up.
He looks down.
I raise binoculars.
He raises a gun.
The stars, a streak.
The gun, a flash.
These fragments of comets.
He is leaving us
to become a fragment
streaking across the sky,
joining a different orbit,
joining the Leonids,
his new family, his new home
as I spin around the sun,
as the stars spin around us,
as we all spin in a circle.
©JEF 2011
Ten weeks after the World Trade Center towers were attacked and destroyed, my father put a rifle to his left temple and took his life. He shot himself for reasons not associated with the towers, but because these two enormous losses came so close together, they intertwined in my mind at the time.
News stories followed the bigger public tragedy while I tried to assemble information and make sense of my personal tragedy.
In the weeks and months after the towers were brought down, those who had been in them, and who were now missing, were presumed dead. But I recall a news story then about one such man, presumed dead in the destruction, who turned up at his home in New Jersey after wandering for several weeks with trauma-induced amnesia. Imagine the shock, the relief his family felt. It must have seemed like a literal miracle: someone’s son, husband, father, turned up from the grave. Deep inside me, I felt that if it happened there, maybe it could happen here.
Much like the relatives of those destroyed in the towers, I did not see my father’s death or his body. He killed himself in Florida; I live on the opposite edge of the continent. I was told of his suicide but could not experience or absorb it firsthand, couldn’t see it for myself. So I began dreaming that my father was still alive and there had just been some kind of odd error. In one of these dreams, my father interrupted a burglar. A fight ensued, someone was shot, and a body was found… but it turned out to be the thief. My father remained missing. Perhaps he fled in fear of being found guilty of killing someone. On the television news, I watched a reporter speak from my parents’ backyard about the break-in, the struggle, the death, and my father who disappeared into the forest of Florida pines behind their property.
In another dream, I encountered my still-living father wandering through a desert, suffering from amnesia. He had no memory of his suicide attempt, no recollection of how he got so far from home, and no knowledge of how to get back. Around this time, there was another heart-breaking news story about a fourteen year old boy somewhere in the northeast who ran away from his mother and abusive step-father after years of being severely beaten and starved. He knew his biological father lived in central Florida, but not the exact city. Somehow this young man got to Florida and went door to door in search of his father or anyone who might know his father. He showed up, emaciated, dehydrated, suffering from exposure and his beatings, on the doorstep of someone who took him in. The boy’s father was found and contacted but by then it was too late. The boy died of his condition before the father could reach him.
In my imagination, in my dreams, in my psyche, I wondered if my poor father was suffering from amnesia, dehydration and exposure, had left central Florida and reached California…going door to door, trying to find his son. My father needed me. I had to find him, rescue him. But where was he?
1939--2001
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