for my father

He’d have missed some of these latest days

our family re-joined

old stories re-told

but told longer this time

as if they grew like rings on trees every year.



I feel compelled to ask you

to raise your hand (and keep it raised) if you were related to Chuck

or if you weren’t related but if he ever smiled at you

or if you ever made anyone else feel at home anywhere

or if you ever laughed at anything ever.

And to also ask you to look around a little because, if Dad were here today,

the people who hands are raised are

the people he would make feel welcome

whose day he’d prefer to brighten

whose hopes he’d like to lift

whose laugh he’d try to earn

and who would likely come to love him sometime during their long, long first conversation. And in the fashion of teachers everywhereI feel compelled to ask youto raise your hand (and keep it raised) if you were related to Chuckor if you weren’t related but if he ever smiled at youor if you ever made anyone else feel at home anywhereor if you ever laughed at anything ever.And to also ask you to look around a little because, if Dad were here today,the people who hands are raised arethe people he would make feel welcomewhose day he’d prefer to brightenwhose hopes he’d like to liftwhose laugh he’d try to earnand who would likely come to love him sometime during their long, long first conversation. Ok, i’ve asked too much for my stunt. please go ahead and lower your hands.

Dad would tell me things in confidence

about so many people

about his brothers and sister, his parents, his wife, his daughter,

his grandchildren, his colleagues,

about the many people who touched his life -

He would say such gracious and beautiful things about all of you

and his candidness is all the more remarkable

for its being entirely accurate.

All of you are a part of my parents’ gift to me

and I’m grateful to consider you

my friends and family.

And this is where I should hear my dad’s voice

this is his place, talking to all of you

not mine.

It was his gift, sharing and relating,

I can only pretend to do it –

nevertheless my father deserves my real voice today

not the one I adopted to get dates or fit in

but the mewling, nerdy, know-it-all one

that’s actually more about he and I given its provenance from his selflessness.

So I’ll use *it* hoping maybe I can still conjure his

loving presence

since I can’t hold him.

Especially now

I sometimes feel more like my dad than myself.

I lazily believed I contained only lonely possibility

but listening carefully I hear a gulf mostly filled with his beautiful echoes.

I carry Dad’s cadence, a sing-song “welllll now, Mary”

is my preamble now.

His whistle, used as the transition between dialogues

as if air were filled with fuel for music

which he would combust easily into playful flickerings,

this whistle I’ve adopted

less his talent.

You know, hearing him in my own voice got harder as

Dad and I spoke of death more often

nearer to today’s memorial.

He cried sometimes,

his agility devolved by medicine or maybe

illness,

or ministrations,

or misfortune,

or loneliness,

or maybe even joy and wouldn’t we be so lucky if that were true.

And my last words about death to him (just hours before he died)



“I’d rather not risk my father who can still use words like ‘elicit’”

laid perpendicularly to his last words about it



“well, son, if that was the last Blazers game i’ll see, it was a good one” (And it was – they came back from an four point deficit with 32 seconds on the clock to a series of teeth-gritting plays that led to a wildly improbable last-second lob – if you didn’t see it you missed an actual thing.)

The game was a barn-burner

for a man familiar with farms

but while we talked this deep, terrible hole was being burned open beneath us.

I thought him fatalistic

and Dad instead gained another opportunity

to teach me about hubris.

He’s gone

and now i think my heart might be a different shape

it feels odd in my chest

like it gained right angles

I need him here. I’m very selfish. I need him to see the rest. And he deserved a longer life; he earned it.

And I know he’d hate this struggle we have

coping with his passing,

so I’ve been re-reading this prose I found,

like a koan.

It’s a small part of a poem by Wendell Berry

and if I read it maybe it’ll actually cast some easement here

but you have to imagine you’ve laid your head

on my Dad’s chest

and he’s reading it to you after some bullies in school

stole your bicycle.

“But do not let your ignorance

Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay

You, or overwhelm your thoughts.

Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever

Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger

Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought

Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous

To me and to yourselves.”

Our taste in poems and other deft art was similar and precise

as wide in variance as a hairline crack in a glacier,

apt, since we both liked art with a bit of peril

as if to say

this experience might tip you from this-you to the next

changing you to something unrecognizable to yourself

but better, more true to the universe as it is now.

Especially one day,

Dad, after watching a TV special about a man dying of cancer,

one of the talking wounded specials,

suggested that “well son, it’s a story that’s almost enough to make a guy tell the truth for the rest of his life.”

These seemingly small moments of brave sharing

would nearly burst my heart with sharp joy

and now my lives may always have to measure the reach

of this father-friend

who liked to show me the shape I would become

rather than cutting my edges so I could fit a preferred cast more to his liking

since it seemed what he liked best was to recognize native clay

solid in its mystery

and observe how its wonder was synecdoche for the indescribable majesty of

its being observed by someone.

Hard to believe

he will no longer age

as I continue changing

growing strange to whatever I once was.

But he’s growing still

as something like light in me and my family

and as I feel tossed lightly and dropped suddenly

living as we all do

like a dinghy in a vast sea

I know there’s a point

I can steer toward

since his life will be my lighthouse

so that I’ll always know how to go home.



Charles Adelbert Wetherell III, 1941-2011