Father’s Day Stories

I am of the age, where several times a year, I will learn of a friend’s father’s death. Attending these funerals becomes an affirmation of a life well lived. The chief signal being the quality of the eulogies provided by fully-grown sons and daughters.

With families of their own, they demonstrate by words and actions, how well their father’s had done in raising them. In doing so, they pay the ultimate tribute to the man they called Dad, Pop, Daddy, or Father.

This is an experience I will never have, given that the full extent of my relationship with my own father is a few scant memories when I was a young child and he died without my knowing on the day I graduated college – a fact I wouldn’t learn for another 15 years.

Sadly, I have also attended a few funerals of friends who were fathers themselves. Whose lives were taken while their children were still growing. Their early deaths meaning they will never be able to experience their children’s major life milestones and the million tiny moments in between them.

As I sat in a pew of a church on Friday, moved to tears not in just losing one of those friends but by seeing his two children who had lost so much more, I reflected on my own daughters – selfishly praying that I will have enough time to say and do all the things they will need to one day make it on their own.  

In the solitude of that church and the hour long drive after, I thought about my friends, their fathers and their children – and of course my own.

Sadness eventually gave way to solace, as I began to think of the times we have shared and the stories we have created. 

Realizing that much like the physics law that states gas expands to fill any container, so too will our stories expand to fill our life. 

And while, we have little control over how large this container called life is, we have quite the say in how it gets filled.

I hope your father’s day was filled, making or remembering,  great stories. 

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