FATHER'S DAY

Today is one of the toughest days of the year.

My father died over ten years ago and my sister and I have had to go on without him. The truth is that he lives inside of me. Not just in my genetic material, but in memory, example, and values.

There are memories that still overwhelm me. He was an utterly "innocent man" and his never ending kindness to all humans and all animals mark him for all time.

He grew up the eldest child of many children. By the time he was grown, he was the eldest of 7 sisters and 3 brothers. But, in truth there were a total of 23 siblings. Back in those days, infant mortality was much higher than it is now. When he was 13, he needed to quit school and go to work in a fish market to bring in cash to help his mother as she struggled alone against abject poverty with all those children to feed. He never got a chance to finish his education.

Then, WWII came. He and Mama married March 2, 1942. He left for Europe 2 days later. He went to England first. Later, he parachuted into France where he got lost. Many of the men got lost and were separated from their comrades. Had it not been for supportive French citizens who hid him and fed him, he would have been taken by the Germans. There were many Germans about. Daddy was a grunt and front line cannon fodder. Towards the end of the war, he and other American soldiers walked into concentration camps and cleaned up the remains. He never forgot. It changed him forever! It was important that no one ever tried to tell him the holocaust was a hoax. He saw it with his own eyes. He saw and smelled the piles of rotting corpses. There were still remnants of human beings in the ovens. He smelled the cooked and rotting flesh with his own nose.

In January, 1945 he finally came home. I was born October 5, 1946. For a long time, he sufferred acutely from what we now call PTSD. In the 1940's, we didn't even know what PTSD was. He was unable to go to the side of town that housed the slaughterhouse. The smells overwhelmed him and flooded him with memories of those concentration camps. For years, he and Mama could not eat in a diner or restaurant near a factory. The lunch whistle and quitting time whistle would cause him to take cover under any available table.

He took a job on the assembly line in a factory. It was the same factory where Mama worked during the war. Mama was one of the original Rosie the Riveters. She worked inside of tanks being constructed for the war effort. After the war, the factory went back to constructing refrigerators and that's what Daddy did for several years.

Later, Daddy finally was accepted into the union for Operating Engineers. He had operated heavy equipment during the war and help construct landing fields and runways for American planes in France and eventually Germany. Work was not slow, but Daddy was low man on the totem pole for many years and had to work himself up to being a man that was routinely sent out on jobs. It was back breaking, hard dirty work with very long hours. It was also seasonal with little heavy construction work done during the long cold Indiana winters. Many winters were hungry ones for us.

I remember one winter more clearly than any of my life. There was no work and it was brutally cold with snow thigh high. We had so very little. Daddy and Mama took jobs for the telephone company walking the streets of Evansville, Indiana delivering telephone books--house to house. They got 10 cents for each telephone book delivered. They earned enough for my sister and I to have food and a meager Christmas. I'm 62 and I still cry when I think of their dogged loyalty and commitment to providing for my sister and I. We had food that winter. Looking back, they went hungry.

Over the years, things got financially better. Then, Mama died at 62 and Daddy went on to live another 18 years without her. He did the best he could.

I was a rebellious, stuck up, prideful, stubborn, ungrateful, arrogant little brat in my youth. I didn't tell him enough how much I loved him. I didn't say I was sorry when I should have. I didn't recognize what an incredible human being he was. I didn't appreciate his sacrifice and his loyalty and his love. There are so many things I should have said and so many things I should have done. There were so many times when I was disrespectful and unkind.

Now, I live with the grief every day. He's dead and I cannot ask his forgiveness or tell him how wrong I was. I cannot say I love you. I threw away my opportunities. Every day is hard, but Father's Day is the hardest day of the year. Daddy, I am so sorry. You deserved so much more from life and you deserved so much more from me.

The grief from the death of loved ones is horrible, but the grief of my own mistakes--of my unkindness, of my disrespect-- I will carry with me to my grave. I made my bed. I must lie in it.