Passings.

Today is December 1st. My father, were he still alive, would have been 82 today.

When my mother had to be placed into an assisted care facility five years ago, it fell to my sisters and myself to clean out the house she and my father had built with their own two hands in the early fifties. My father had files on everything. I found the receipt and warranty to the original furnace of the house, bills for nails and lumber, blueprints. I found instruction manuals to appliances purchased from the fifties through the late eighties (he died in 1990). I found pictures of people I did not know, with no names or notes tying them to his world or mine. I found every letter he sent home to his parents during World War II (although, ironically, I never found the letters they sent him).

I spent quite a bit of time reading those letters. My father was a distant man, totally immersed in his job at what was then Univac. He never knew what to make of children, and we never knew what to make of him. It never occurred to me that he had ever been young once.

It never occurred to me that he might have been engaged before ever meeting my mother. I never knew that he had to sneak around with his girlfriend because her father did not approve of the match (she came from good Mennonite stock, and my father was raised Lutheran … at least, I think he was). I was as shocked as he must have been 45 years earlier when I learned that her father married her off as soon as my father entered the Navy.

She sent him a Christmas card, just after he learned of her marriage, apologizing to him for the way he found out. It was red, with silver sprinkles and a very old fashioned poem. He sent it to his parents for safekeeping. I never knew he was that close to his parents that he would have shared so intimate a loss so thoroughly. He was never that close to his own family.

I have pictures of my father with the other officers of his ship standing in front of great monasteries and open markets in China. He was thin then, and quite handsome. I stare at the pictures, trying to tie them back into the heavy-set, aloof man I knew, but the father I had never smiled the way that lieutenant in the picture smiles for immortality.

The man never let me into his life. And I, for my part, never let him into mine. This morning I feel the loss afresh.