Final Acts

My father died last Sunday.

It happened, ironically and perhaps significantly, about the time I crafted my last essay on Omnium-Gatherum titled ‘The Winter of our Discontent.’ I got the call about an hour or two after I posted. We knew the winter was coming on for him but it caught us by surprise when it hit. It was obviously the winter of Dad’s discontent because he took his own life that morning.

My brothers and I drove up to his house yesterday to start the process cleaning out and closing down the place he and Mom had lived for the past twenty-five plus years. He had built it, they had furnished it and it was the way he wanted it. I know that because I had asked him about it two weeks ago when my wife and I had last seen him alive. He had arrived at a point where he didn’t want anything changed. At least he believed that nothing could now be changed for things were now beyond his control, so he thought—except for one thing—the final act.

It was not hard for me to start to go through the papers, see the photographs—many faded—taken down from the walls, to clean out from the living quarters of the house the accumulated detritus of a lifetime. Not hard for me until I stepped into his garage. I stood there for a long time. I looked at his tools, the labeled bottles and cans containing nuts and bolts and washers. I looked at his old taped up hammer, his faded and frayed work jacket and boots, the bench grinder remembered from my boyhood fifty years ago, the old truck, the fishing rods, pieces of projects, things that he had worked on and touched with his hands. I remembered his hands.

I went back into the house. I came back in this time to look at things in there that were significant for him like the things in his garage. I now looked at magazines and cards kept, items taped to the refrigerator, the book on cars I once gave him next to the chair he sat upon in the dark corner of his living room. I looked at the ashes in the now cold fireplace. My heart hurt for him.

“Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die, and more especially for those that have not hope of a glorious resurrection.” (Doctrine and Covenants, 42:45)

Perhaps I did not love enough for I have not yet wept. Not for him. Not yet.

I have thought much about final acts. I have wept for those whom I have loved—both the dead and the living. I have tried to replay those significant final acts that have occurred in my life where I have had involvement with my people—significant because they were final and because at the time I didn’t know that they would be final. Many times these remembrances have come unbidden. I have tried to identify the tipping points in the lives of those I love, the angle beyond repose where things started to slide, the road taken and the road not taken. I have tried to identify the points where I made a difference in their lives and where I might have made a difference but failed. I think now where I still might make a difference. I hope I can. “Thou shalt live together in love….”

I replay the poet’s words that are indelibly etched in my mind: “God pity them both, and pity us all, who vainly the dreams of youth recall, for of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.”

And finally this: “I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” (Robert Frost)
So it has.

My benediction for today is that our final acts will not be rued by ourselves or others as the equivalent of the road not taken but which, if it had been, would have made “all the difference.”

Farewell, Dad.