Remembering
Today is the anniversary of my father's death. It's been 18 years. Most years I've had to remind myself of the date. The real mourning always happened on my birthday which I shared with my father.
This year I've been increasingly aware of it. Part of it is a response to my mother's visit a few months ago. Being with my mother is a jolt because she has 'changed' so much since my father's death. Many of the things that in recent years have been so difficult to deal with were behaviors I never saw in my mother until after my father died. It's hard to realize that much of what I knew of my mother was very much a reflection of my father and that she really wasn't so different from her siblings in many ways.
The other part of it is a response to the growing understanding of my faith and the integration of my faith into my everyday life. My father was a model of faithful living for me. He very much lived his faith everyday - both in his private and in his public life. In some ways my life is vastly different from the life my father led. In other ways, it is very much the same. The priorities of faith, love and integrity and how those priorities were woven into your relationships - these are things I learned from my father - sometimes from what he said but more often from how he lived.
I watched the Little Mermaid this afternoon with kitty and Christopher. Ariel's relationship with her father has some of the flavor of the relationship I had with my father. There was much we disagreed on but there was a tremendous amount of love in our relationshp. When I made decisions, my father's 'blessing' came not so much because he agreed with what I was doing but because he trusted that that values he had taught me, the values he had lived before me, were inside of me and would guide me. The moments of greatest sorrow since my father's death have been when I wished that he could see how what he taught me has been translated into my life.