Father's Day and Being a Son

Tomorrow will mark the 44th Father's Day I spend without my Dad  Maybe more than anything else in my life, I miss having him around.

There is an indescribable joy to be a son of someone you adore and who adores you in equal measure. And that reciprocity has been absent for me almost my entire adult life. 

There is a level of guilt in expressing this lament, as though I feel sorry for myself, as though I was deprived of something I deserved. As though I had been robbed. But I cannot help but mourn what has been lost.

There are few simple truths for any of us. Few definites. Few conclusions without hint of contradiction. But there was no hesitation for me about my dad. No maybes, no internal calculations, no question marks. I was all in from my first breath to his last one.

You would think that having wandered through the decades since my dad's death,  I would now have relegated him to the recesses of my mind. That he would pop up on birthdays, holidays and maybe at an odd moment or two through the years. But I don't think my gravitational pull towards him has waned at all, even as I now am in my eighth decade. I want as desperately today as I did in the hours and days after his passing to be his son, not merely in name but in his presence.

I am a father and grandfather now but, for me, tomorrow will not be about those designations, as glorious as they are. It will now and forever more be about my being a son.

His son.