A bid farewell to my father

Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stop seeing you as dangerous. I’ve always remembered that – how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor. You live your life by a code, an ethos. Every man does. It’s your shoreline. It’s what guides you home, and trust me, you’re always trying to get home. My father was a reader – Churchill, of course, but also Faulkner and books about Tecumseh. He loved artists who painted people with bodies that looked like boxes. I’d give him hell about that. He'd just say you gotta look harder. “Look harder,” my father would say. I always knew he wasn’t just talking about those boxy abstract paintings. There’s threats everywhere in a world that’s draped in camouflage. My father’s grandfather gave up his life flying a B-24 in World War 2. He kept the Liberator aloft just long enough for everyone to jump and then he went down with the plane. That’s the blood coursing in my veins…
My father was a good man. Growing up without him was hard. It hurt. l felt alone, out to sea with no shore in sight. l wonder “Why me?” “Why him?” I have to remember I have warrior’s blood in my veins. The code that made my father who he was is the same code that’ll make me a woman he would admire, respect. I put my pain in a box. Lock it down. Like those people in the paintings my father liked, we are people made up of boxes: chambers of loss, triumph, of hurt and hope and love. No one is stronger or more dangerous than a man who can harness his emotions, his past. Use it as fuel, as ammunition, as ink to write the most important letter of your life. Before my father died he asked me to give you this poem by Tecumseh. I told him I’d fold it into a paper airplane, and in a way I guess that’s what I’m doing – sailing it from him to you.



So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about their religion
Respect others in their view
And demand that they respect yours
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life
Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people
Abuse no one and nothing
When it comes your time to die
Be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death
So that when their time comes
They weep and pray for a little more time
To live their lives over again in a different way
Sing your death song
And die like a hero going home