I didn’t invite my father on our family vacation. But there he was anyway, everywhere I went, front and center, pointing, explaining, reminiscing, sharing, reflecting, the way he never did in life. During our two-week stay in Sicily, my father, who died 18 years ago, never left my side.
Read MoreSometimes we shared a cake. I have a picture that proves this. It’s of my father and me, blowing out candles on a double-layer birthday cake festooned with confectionery flowers, which my mother made for the two of us when I was 6 and he was 30.
In the picture, I am seated before the cake doing more looking at than blowing out the candles my mother has arranged. Thirty-one for him, seven for me, the extras for good luck. My mother was always courting good luck.
Read MoreHe never complains. I call him between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. every night and he is always upbeat.
“Hi Beverly,” he says and I hear a smile in his voice.
“Hi LeRoy,” I answer, and because he’s smiling, I smile, too.
LeRoy is my father’s youngest brother, the last of the Curtin clan, my grandmother’s baby, my only living uncle. He was born 94 years ago this Sunday, on Oct. 17, in Cambridge when Cambridge had more factories than universities.
Read MoreA man died suddenly on February 25th. His name was George Thomas IV. He was 38, married, the father of two boys who are 5 and 3, and a baby daughter who is due in August. It was early evening. He was working out in his basement. And he collapsed. His wife, Marissa, found him.
Read MoreIt made him sad, leaving before the ending. Not just the ending of “Lost,” a television drama he was hooked on. It made him sad to leave us, too, his family.But he knew there was more. “I think they are all in Purgatory,” he said a few weeks after “Lost” premiered. The popular weekly series, which aired on Wednesday nights…
Read More'Tell me, Dad. Please, tell me about you." That's what I would say to my father if I could sit with him at his kitchen table one more time. I spent so many hours…
Read MoreThey have been my surprise silver lining in 2017, Facebook posts from a guy I barely know about a baby I've never met. Words and photos that gripped me from the start, that made me hope and gave me hope, and that continue, every day, to make me smile.
Read MoreI miss him most at Christmas. It doesn't matter that I am too old to be missing a father. It doesn't matter that my memory is selective and that time has nipped and tucked events so that they appear perfect. Memory deceives. But Christmas, when I was a child, really was perfect. My father turned into a kid every December…
Read MoreThere is no "ex" in father. Once a father, always a father.
My father used to say this to me, though not in these words. He used to say, because I was his only child, his "one and only" (these are his words), that he was the only one in the "whole world" (more of his words) who could call me "daughter." And I was the only one in the whole world who could call him "father."
Read MoreIt used to be easy. More than easy. It was like breathing. It happened without thought. I'd be driving - past my old school, Tower Hill, where my best friend, Rosemary, and I used to play; past the halfway point, where Rosemary and I used to meet; past St. Bernadette's Church, where my husband and I were married. And I'd see these places exactly as they had been, 10, 20, 30 years before - Tower Hill School hidden behind a hedge of lilacs so thick you could smell them from the next block; the halfway point all woods and swamp and orange lilies; St. Bernadette's so new it looked placed, not built, on the black macadam…
Read MoreI am my father's daughter. I have his hands, old hands, worker's hands, calloused and sun damaged. And I have his ways. His ways I accept. The hands stun me. I look at them and they are his, only smaller; the fingers short, the knuckles creased, the veins like tree roots too close to the surface. How and when did this happen? My father's hands fixed things. They were exact, like tweezers, plucking tubes from the back of our TV, testing them, until the one that was making the picture arc was found…
Read MoreHer history is hospitals. They're where she lived, where she grew up and where parts of her died. They were the best hospitals, the Ivy Leagues of psychiatric care. Her father, a heart surgeon, trusted these places, with their names that overshadowed their failures. They had big reputations and bigger price tags. He took her to one after another. But his daughter slipped deeper into herself and further away from him. He wouldn't give up. He refused to accept the "We're sorry, but there's nothing more we can do" he kept hearing. "If you try something four times and it doesn't work, then you try it again," says Dr. Frank Spencer, now in his 80s.
Read MoreThe grandfather is the hero in this story, a humble, hardworking man who dedicated his life to his family, who had no dreams except theirs. "We didn't know," his grandchildren said. They'd heard the tales of his hardships - didn't all grandparents walk to school uphill both ways? - but they hadn't listened. One week ago, at his funeral, they listened and wept. Vincenzo Tagliarini was 13 in 1926 and living in Sicily, the oldest of four when his father died. He became a man overnight. He quit school and took over the family farm. He grew vegetables and olives, not just to eat but to sell. When his sister fell off a horse and died, he helped bury her, then returned to the fields to work.
Read MoreIs this what happens as you age? Does everything new always bring back the memory of something old? Is the past both a minefield and an archeological dig only to those who have lived 40 or 60 or 80 years? Or does this happen to 20-year-olds, too? A puppy makes you think of your old dog young. A birthday brings back other birthdays. A perfect October day makes you think of other October days.
Read MoreMy father was not overtly, nor even subtly, religious . He hardly ever went to church and I didn't have a sense that he prayed, though at the end of his life he told me that St. Jude was his good buddy. I imagine, though, that he talked to St. Jude in the way he talked to me, not often couching his requests with "please" and "if possible," but stating them directly and firmly as in, "I need you to do this for me." At the end of his life he handed me a crucifix, which he said he carried with him throughout the Second World War.
Read MoreWe watch them and are amazed. They are like the Internet and Velcro and DVD players and cellphones, everyday staples that weren't even imagined when we were young. My husband and I gawk. "Unbelievable," he says. "Fascinating," I add. Different, we say, and agree that this time different is, indeed, better. It's a few days before Father's Day, and we are watching our sons-in-law father. We are watching them make lunch, change diapers, read stories, give baths, sing lullabies, tuck their children into bed, clean up, load the dishwasher, and unload the dryer.
Read MoreI thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops. But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.
Read MoreWhat I know now, what I've learned but what I have to remind myself every day, is that none of it matters. The snow. Sitting in traffic. Missing a flight. Forgetting to TiVo "Lost." A bad cup of $2 coffee. A woman sitting in her car, WHAT IS SHE DOING JUST SITTING??? while you are waiting with your blinker clicking for her to pull out of a space so you can pull in because the parking lot is that crowded and it's not even a Saturday.
Read MoreRobert sits on a chair next to his father's bed. He holds his father's hand and talks to him just to talk. He tells him about the day's news, about a weekend they spent in Maine, about all the people who have come to the hospital to visit. When an aide arrives to take his father's temperature with a thermometer she has to put in his ear, Robert explains the procedures. His father motions and Robert understands. "You want some water?" he asks. The older man nods and Robert adjusts the bed and holds his father and puts a cup to his lips and says, "It's coming," as he tilts the cup so that just a tiny bit of liquid drips into his father's mouth. More than a little will make him choke and cough and struggle for breath. And he is struggling hard enough as it is.
Read MoreYou want something out of the ordinary for a Father's Day story.
You want a tale of tenacity: Jamie Fiske's father fighting for a liver transplant for his small daughter. Or a tale of courage: Ricky Hoyt's father repeatedly achieving, with his physically challenged son, seemingly impossible goals. Or a gripping melodrama: a soldier clinging to a picture of a child he has never seen, enduring great hardships, surviving deadly battles, fed by the need to go home and embrace his son.
Read More
ABOUT COLUMNS ARCHIVES WHAT’S ON MY MIND GALLERY IT’S NEVER TOO LATE BOOKS CONTACT
Copyright © 2020 Beverly Beckham
Web Design by: SKILLARA | Marketing + Media
