Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
Almost 30 years ago, my father died. Diagnosis to death was a mere four months. So young—only 65. He spent two short years with his grandsons before the cancer took him. The cancer stole the joy of watching his grandsons grow along with the opportunity to pass on his quiet wisdom.
With all hope gone, I decided to pull his feeding tube—no sense prolonging the inevitable.
He was not in pain. He did not cry. He held my mother’s hand.
“Marie is here with me,” he whispered to my mother. “She’s sitting right there,” he said, pointing towards the empty chair in the corner. “Don’t you see her?”
My mother did not see Marie, but she did not dare break the moment.
Marie, Dad’s sister, twenty years his senior, had died many years earlier. She had raised and protected him like a second mother. And here she was now. Perhaps to guide him home.
My father was a quiet man. He carried himself with dignity, shaped by hardship and service. Four tours of duty in combat zones. He was a military man—U.S. Air Force— “Straighten out and fly right” was the refrain I heard throughout my childhood.
He served during the wars in Korea and Vietnam—during a time of extreme unrest and uncertainty. He worked Supply but I learned later that Supply was just a cover.
He never spoke much about what he saw, but I could see it in his eyes. The war lingered in his silences. It haunted him—the loss, the loneliness, the sense of duty fulfilled, but never appreciated and at great personal cost.
Like many Veterans, he sought solace in drink, in cigarettes. For a time, they quieted his nerves. But later, determined to be better for us, his wife and daughters, he quit drinking. Just like that.
One hot Southwest Texas day, he did not have his customary beer. He did not crack open a beer the next day either. Four years later, on the anniversary of his sobriety, he quit smoking too. The damage, however, had been done.
The first signs were subtle — loss of appetite and difficulty swallowing. “It must be a cold,” he told my sister. But we all knew something was wrong. Soon, the diagnosis confirmed our worst fears.
“This is a bad dream,” I told him. “Maybe we should take a trip.” But the dream had become a nightmare, and it never ended.
The day he died, the weather was gray and drizzly, a typical Seattle day in December. But when the phone rang, I felt the air sucked out of the room.
In an instant my life became heavy with grief. Like a thick, humid blanket.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
“Dad died.”
And just like that, the world dimmed.
In a strange haze, I went through my daily motions. I had lunch plans. The family photo needed my approval before printing our family holiday cards. I had many errands to run. So, I went. It felt wrong, but also strangely necessary.
________________________________________________________
As I drove down my steep, tree-lined hill, I was suddenly surrounded by him. My father. Towering. Vast. His presence stretched from treetop to treetop, from one side of the road to the other. He hovered over me—not threatening, but commanding, protective.
He had come to say goodbye.
Was it his soul? His spirit unbound from his worn-out body.
The years have passed quickly. But my father lives on—in me, and in my boys.
My oldest son walks and talks like him. Never met a stranger. He’s just like Dad. I see my Dad in my own reflection: my reddish curly hair (although no one ever saw Dad’s curls — he always had the military cut even long after he retired). I see him in my furrowed brow, the mischievous twinkle in my eyes reflected back at me. I feel him when I light the barbecue, when I listen to a car engine, when I scold my children. “Get out of that tree! You are going to break your neck.”
“Have them check the spark plug,” I can almost hear him say. “The car doesn’t sound right to me.”
He is with me still. In the practical advice, the humor, the steady quiet and the nervous gestures he passed down.
His ashes are in the backyard. At night I look up at the stars and feel him there—silent, steady, brilliant.
My mother joined him four years later. Her ashes are buried in the backyard too. I see her in the robin that hops across the lawn. I hear her in its song: cheer-up, cheer-a-lee, cheer-ee-o.
A wooden bench separates the two, an appropriate gesture. I never doubted their love for each other but a little separation is probably for the best.
I used to think death was the end. When you’re dead, you’re dead. When we go, we are forgotten.
Would it be ridiculous to say we live on? Memory and love preserve my father in my heart.
Maybe it is immortality: to be remembered not only in stories, but in gestures, in instincts, in the stars and the birdsong.
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there. I did not die. ~ by Clare Harner in 1934.
2 Responses
So touching……
Thank you. He is greatly missed.