We just celebrated Father’s Day in the United States. I spent it watching films Dad and I loved. Memory gave him new life. In an earlier time, before we had dogs and a child and while we still had living parents, we spent three-day weekends driving to see my parents or Jeff’s for a quick visit.
One year, we arrived as early splashes of autumn color marked the trees. My brother grilled dinner while I talked to my father. Jeff chased our niece and nephew around the yard. Dad seemed fine, firmly in the period of life that follows middle age and precedes fragility. It was his autumn too. We talked of this and that. Then he looked at the sun setting in the west and his tone became reflective. He said calmly that he had walked farther than he had yet to walk, and perhaps that was not a bad thing. It is never a bad thing to know you are nearing Home.
My father died suddenly nine years later. He walked to the post box to drop off mail, walked home, and fell just inside the front door. My mother, who was a CPR instructor for the Red Cross, tried to resuscitate him until the medics came, but his heart did not restart.
I think of him as he was that day—scents of fall and outdoor grills in the air— standing with his hand gently over his face, looking at a setting sun and talking of the journey and the journey’s end. All of our lives end the same, in a death. What makes life a miracle, a challenge, a wonder we can never fully comprehend is the journey, the steps and stumbling blocks and wild, wonderful rides that mark the landscape between birth and death.
None of us knows how long our journey will be, how many steps or sunsets or years are left to us. My father was in his sixties the evening he talked directly, for the first time, about his life and death. At that age, it was more than fair to say he had walked farther than he had yet to go. I have now lived more than half a century, and I have almost certainly walked more than halfway Home.
It isn’t the distance that matters, either how far I have come or how far I have yet to go. What matters is that I look back often enough to retain the best of what was, weigh what to let go, and walk purposefully forward. There is much I want to do, to write, to say, moments I want to share with my family, my son, my pets, all of the friends who have blessed my life and given it richness.
Regardless of your age, whether you count steps or haven’t begun to feel there is even a finite number of steps to count, we know some things. We should live every day fully, as if we have forever and yet as if it is our last.
Do what needs to be done. Love without reservation. Make a difference today. Do not downplay or forget the comfortable, the kind, the quiet because it is not the extraordinary, the amazing, the symphonic.
I always loved listening to my father, the scholarly, religious historian who never felt young again after he saw his lieutenant die after stepping on a landmine on their first day in Europe in World War II.
For all of the knowledge and insights he shared for more than 40 years, I remember the message captured in a quiet conversation while waiting for dinner. Life is partially as beautiful as it is because we never know how colorful it will be or how long it will last.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD/ (c) Healing Woman