Kara & Michael’s Blog

I have to confess, I always hated the two to three weeks of the year that encompass Memorial Day and Father’s Day. While I lived at my mom’s, both of these days would be marked by a trip to the grocery for flowers and then a trip to the graveyard to visit my cousin, my great grandmother, and finally – the resting spot of my uncle and my father, who both died the same year.

There is little that feels emptier than a graveyard on Father’s Day.  Memorial Day is a bit more inviting because plenty of relatives are around visiting people, and the armed forces come in and there are flags on all the veterans graves and it feels more like a celebration and less like mourning. I think it is the honoring the veterans that brings that sensation out for me – I think it is just for people to visit veterans and honor them for their sacrifices.

But on Father’s Day, people are inside watching sports or outside playing sports, or out at restaurants and lavishing their dads with cheesy ties and useless gadgets and maybe some fancy alcohol.

It’s not really that visiting my dad’s grave depresses me. He’s dead, I get it, I’ve gotten it for five years now. It just feels meaningless and trite. I never understood people who get all up in arms about visiting graves. I buried my dad five years ago, in his pajamas with a basketball hat and a hockey souvenir. We picked out a bad ass headstone, put a quote from the song he sung endlessly while coping with my cousin’s death and that’s it. It’s pretty anticlimactic, when you think about it.

I don’t gain any comfort, any insight, any emotion from visiting his grave. It’s so far from him that it doesn’t feel like anything. Eventually, all we have left of someone is that – meaningless objects we attribute meaning to. Well, that and our memories. I’m at a point where it’s hard for me to call back memories unassociated with a topic at hand.  If I just think of my father, I would describe him in an every-day sort of way. No pain and no particular charms, just a man. He would be reading the morning paper aloud and drinking coffee.

I think that so much of my attachment to memories is due to my desire to go back to the way life used to be. I don’t desire that so much any more. I’m not searching for validation in my memories, not searching for the critical moments where my relationship with my dad or with myself changed or turned. I just fondly remember who he was in a basic sense. Drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, driving his car, reading the paper, making smart-ass comments. The specificities matter less and less. My father married my mother, he helped raise four kids, he worked hard at a job he didn’t always like, he wore his principles on his sleeve, he was often deep in thought, he was always open to debate, he made time for people, he made people laugh.

I think, in life, we focus too often on particular events. I’m not saying trauma or ecstasy can or should be forgotten. I’m just saying that people aren’t made of trauma or ecstasy.  They’re made of a rub on the shoulder every morning, or a hug every night.

Father’s Day gets a wide share of scorn. I always hated it as a kid, it was boring and it’s impossible to shop for your dad. Plus, they don’t always appreciate the sappy stuff. When I think about it now, the truth is that my dad did appreciate the sappy stuff because it meant that I saw what he did, that I appreciated the every-day dad and not just the “sweet, my dad planned a hockey game birthday party for me.” (Which he did, and it was totally sweet).

So when you think about Father’s Day – scorn the ties and gadgets (unless he really wants that gadget and won’t buy it for himself). Buy your dad sports tickets or take him to a movie or a museum or a concert.  Buy him lunch and maybe get him a card. Don’t be too sappy, but say something simple. “Thanks for bailing me out of jail,” “I’ll never forget that night we saw the no-hitter,” sort of stuff. While dad’s might not be sappy the way moms are, they want to know they’re appreciated, too.  I still wish I had more time with my dad to just do every-day things.

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