This is a song for you,
Far away, far away,
This is a song for you,
Far away,
from me.
It makes me think that on January 18th it will be 40 years since I last saw my father.
He died on a ski hill while the two of us were skiing. It was 1970. He was 52 years old and I was sixteen. He took a heart attack in front of me, fell face down in the snow and promptly died. It seems like yesterday. I took off his skiis, rolled him onto his back, but he was gone. The memory is indelibly burned into my memory of sitting in the snow beside his corpse that winter day while an off-duty doctor, by fluke, happened upon us and tried valiantly but unsuccesfully to revive him.
My father passed into the ages. We became me.
DEATH DOES NOT KILL LOVE
I keep a small room of memories of him in my mind. (I keep little memory rooms in my little grey cells for all the people I love.) His room is filled with mental pictures, things he said and did, various places we went and certain music that reminds of him. I usually keep the door gentle closed to that memory room because, after all, life carries on.
But I'm sitting here on this Saturday morning so far away from that terrible day; it all comes back again. I'm the only person awake in the house. Yes, I've been thinking and reminiscing. On January 18th at 3:30 pm it will be exactly forty years since I saw Dad's manly and beloved face. Yet his venerable face is smiling right in front of me.
Sitting here all alone
Is bringing it on again
I'm gone again,
thinking of you,
Sitting here thinking you
Is driving it home again. ...
His room, deep in my little grey cells, is filled with his words and his devotion to God and family, his love of children, his commitment to community and education -- in other words, the very essence what made him him. (After he died the small town where we lived named a school after him. See Http://www.wrsd.ca/hwpickup/about.htm). The epitaph on my Dad's tombstone reads, "He served God and man."
James Taylor's song continues on my stereo,
Open the door it takes me back,
Mention you name and I'm gone again,
Ahh, I'm gone again.
Today the door to his room in my mind is opening easily. Peeking in I can smell old books and his pipe tobacco. His reading lamp is on and and his Bible is laying open on the family's heavy, over-stuffed and worn burgundy 1940s style chesterfield. (Dad wasn't the type to discard something just because it was old.) His reading glasses are sitting on the Bible's pages waiting for him to return from somewhere far away. I look down to see Psalm 139. (The first 10 verses were read at his funeral.)
It's strange that later, much later, years after my first child was aborted in 1971, Psalm 139.13-16 broke my heart and was a major influence in my own repentance and becoming involved in the Pro-Life movement.
And so as I approach the 40th anniversary of my father's death I imagine my child sitting on his lap, in the light of Christ's love. They are waiting for me.
This is a song for you,
Far away, so far away,
from me.
Mark
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