Time, Dad, and Gravity

Here it is, Halloween, 2009. Seems like just yesterday it was Halloween 2008, 2007, 2006. Halloween 2006, the day my father died from cancer at the age of 74. He'll never be older than 74, no matter how much older I get. Even if I live to be 92 (as my grandmother, his mother, did) or older, my dad will forever be 74. Three score and fourteen years - that's what he had to sample life, to live through ups and downs, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. Not nearly enough, but more than my mother had. She died just shy of her 60th birthday.

I am 55 (and a half). Like many folks my age and older, I now remember key personal events first in terms of the number of years that have elapsed since them. 37 years since high school graduation. 34 years since my first marriage. 30 years since graduating from law school and starting my career. 27 years since my first daughter was born and 25 since my second daughter was. 17 years since my mother died. Six years since meeting Cary. Four years since getting married to her. Three years, today, since Dad died.

I recently told Cary that every time I blink another six months passes by. This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. A friend recently told me that there is a bio-chemical explanation for this phenomenon, that as we age we have more or less of one enzyme or hormone or something with the result that times seems to go faster. I found this interesting, but not interesting enough to spend the 20 seconds it would take to Google it and learn more. No, I know why time is moving fast for me. I've been grappling with a tag team that climbs into the ring with me every day now - mortality and purpose (the stark reality of my own mortality coupled with the pressing desire to use my remaining time in service of something of value, something with purpose). I have a profound desire, as Parker Palmer and others have said, to find that place where my own talents and passions intersect with the world's great needs.

Bit by bit I'm getting closer to that place. I haven't yet had that "Eureka!" moment of clarity, and maybe I never will. But I've at least developed an internal geiger counter that clicks with joy when I am doing something aligned with my mission and is shamefully silent when I just go through the motions of life. My father was a man of comforts and routines, not passions. He was a man who blessed the world in small exchanges with ordinary people, but did not quest to find a deeper purpose for his life. He was a man who was interested in learning interesting new facts, but not in transforming himself or the world. I loved him so very much, and I miss him so very much, that a part of me wants to emulate him. I feel a gravitational pull to be the kind of man he was, instead of the kind of man I am meant to be. Dad wouldn't have wanted this for me. He wanted me to live my life on my terms. But the pull is there. Blood is as salty as the sea, and pulls and pushes with every bit as much force.

Halloween ghosts and goblins don't scare me. Freddy Kruger "wannabes" don't scare me (although I still blanch at the sight of someone begging as Dick Cheney). No, as one Halloween rapidly follows another, what scares me is this: the passing of another year since the day Dad died and the realization that if I am to live an "undivided life," as Parker Palmer says, I had better get on with it. I will honor my Dad on this day every year not by measuring how much like him I am, but by measuring how much like me I am. It's what he would have wanted.

I love you, Dad.