My father’s resting place may house his ashes, but I don’t usually feel his spirit there. That’s partly why I don’t visit it that often, choosing to mostly mark his birthday or holidays with a stop-by, and not much else. I feel him elsewhere – in the garden, on a warm breeze, in the shadow of a a tree. Lately I’ve been missing him so I stopped by his grave to say hello. The stone was warm from a day of sun, and flags lined the place in honor of Memorial Day. A few other cars with visiting loved ones of lost ones were scattered throughout the place, but none in my vicinity. As is usually the case, I didn’t feel my father there.
Even in the shade of a row of ancient evergreens, where he might have been found on a hot day, my father was missing. I looked for him briefly, knowing he wouldn’t be there, and hoping that it was the looking that mattered. As is often the case, I drove away from the cemetery feeling empty, feeling robbed of something, feeling the fact of my father’s absence. And as is occasionally the case, I wasn’t ready to let him go, so I drove to the place where I’ve gone whenever I find myself missing him: St. Mary’s Hospital. My Dad’s most regular ‘office’, where he’d be at work at all days of the day or night trying to save someone’s life and make the world better for other families, the hospital is where I remember my Dad being at key points in life.
I always return to the same space near the entrance of the cafeteria, before a locked door of offices now, but which once housed a conference room where my Dad kept me when I came home early from school one day and he had to be at the hospital. My social anxiety had worked and wreaked its havoc, and I couldn’t handle being at school with the other kids anymore that day – I thought I just missed my parents, and this was the only way to be close to them. I’d expected Dad to be angry for me making him have to pick me up early, the same way I expected him to be angry when I broke one of the garden sprinklers as a child, but he was gentle with me that day, perhaps sensing that I was only there out of fear. The memory recedes at that point, fading away to a slight ache, an emptiness. But I felt my father’s presence there, in those halls he walked, near those vending machines that offered the sandwiches he’d get when his work required him to stay beyond any sort of reasonable hours. I could hear his laughter with Hector the head janitor, his joking with the OR nurses, and his caring comfort for a little boy who mustered all his effort not to cry from missing his parents and growing up.
