Losing my father when he was 60 and I was 25 has put me in a bittersweet family of people that have lost their fathers too soon. It is always too soon. The youngest members of this family of mine lost their dad at the ages of 1 and 3 almost 40 years ago. The oldest members are friends who were lucky enough to call their fathers geddu (grandfather) for many years. It is always too soon. The sooner you lose your father the more you feel like he could have passed on to you so much if he were around longer. The later you lose your father the more you feel like he has passed on to you so much and there was still so much more to learn.
When my father first passed I felt guilty for a long time. I wished I were a better son. I wished I appreciated him more, and I were attentive enough to learn what he had to teach me. Now almost twenty years later I realize this was just another piece of the mosaic of grief that represents the loss of the intellectual contributions of my father in my life. This concept of the mosaic of grief is crafted beautifully by Melissa Kelley, in her book Grief: Contemporary Theory and the Practice of Ministry, where she explains:
"While traditional grief theory can often seem to encourage 'paint-by-number' results, the contemporary field allows us - invites us - to understand each person's grief experience as a particular mosaic, fashioned out of innumerable and varied aspects of one's life, such as one's history of losses, one's relationships, one's ways of making meaning, one's experience of the Divine, one's religious resources, one's sense of community, one's culture, and so on. Each grief mosaic is unique, nuanced, and intricate."
Therefore, even though losing my father was a profound loss, it was accompanied by an equally profound process of ongoing meaning making that continues to shape who I am becoming as a person. Even though my life will never be the same again without him, his death did not mark the end of his deliberate and methodical work of raising me to be someone he is proud to call his son. He continues to pass on to me wisdom about life, about himself, and about the world that he envisioned. These lessons are not written in books or recorded on YouTube videos, but more like trying to retrace your steps back to a place that you remember well enough to think you can get there without a map.
Every time we welcome new members into our family of people who have lost their fathers, I am tempted to write something like this. I am tempted to sit down and share how much I love them, how much I love their fathers, how much their fathers loved them, how much I can appreciate of why it hurts so much to lose them, and so on. The problem is that we are all still left without our fathers, and a silly little essay or blog entry will not change that ... but we do have each other, and our fathers have each other.
I sometimes reflect on what it would be like when Mounir meets Victor and Talaat and Samir and Chuck - do they know their kids are friends, and if so, does this make them closer friends in the eternal realm? Do they introduce each other and say "hey, I want you to meet Sameh, he's new, but he's one of us now?" I sure hope so. We have each other here, and it gives me comfort to believe that they have each other there. Maybe they like the same music.
