Somehow

I made an enlargement of this photo for my mother a few years ago and mounted it on the wall in front of her bed so she could see it every morning. It was a source of delight to her, and she often pointed to it and mentioned it. Taken in 1946 or 1947, it shows her with my father and their first child, my oldest brother, on the grass of Prospect Park. They were a young, hopeful family then, with so much promise and possibility in front of them.

On this day that marks the sad anniversary of my father's untimely death (and the beginning of what was to be nearly thirty-seven years of widowhood for my mother) I cherish this visual reminder that despite tragedy, heartache, and struggle, my father did experience proud and joyful moments. It's comforting to see my parents being happy together, and to know that's mostly what my mother remembered.

I've written about my father a lot, and even now that I have spent more than half my life without him, I still miss him with a gasping kind of intensity.

If I were a tree, there would be a deep gouge in the rings from 1978, a scarring closer to the core than the bark, a visible trauma, but the tree somehow continued to grow.I walk in his shadow. I stand in his light. He was the most loving, selfless, and devoted person I have ever known. The force of all that love has kept me going.