Dear Dad, I have your eyes

When I was a girl I had a crush on a beautiful boy with dark hair and the brownest of eyes. He was tall and athletic and he liked me back. In those years, notes were passed back and forth from one desk to another during school, friend to friend until they reached you, not a simple text from one phone to another. Although that works just as well.

And one day that boy sent me a note. He had boyishly scrawled his words across a neatly ripped and folded sheet of lined paper. His words were simple and started with ‘Your eyes are so blue’ and ended with various other sweet messages I was happy to receive, and eager to reply to. I can still remember gently opening the note, hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice.

As soon as I read the words in the note, I thought of Dad - my first love. I took the paper and wrote beneath that boys scrawl, some words of my own. ‘Thank you, I get them from my Dad’ and various other sweet messages, I am sure he was glad to receive at the time. When I think back on the memory now, I wonder what that boy thought about a response that started with my Dad. It’s funny to me now, as I think about how young we were and how simple things were then, in some ways, just as they are now.

My Dad was largely an unknown to me, quiet, reserved and complex, he was as much a curiosity as he was a steady presence, mostly standing in the background watching as life moved by for his entire life, and mine. It wasn’t until I knew that his time in this world was coming to an end and after he was gone, that I began to realize who he was, and how much like him I really was, despite my trying for years to prove I wasn’t, at all.

I knew his blue eyes, his love of Gordon Lightfoot, his reddened cheeks and his quippy sarcasm better than anyone, as they are mine.

There was so much more to him though, like - his gentle heart(easily bruised), his bright mind (mostly misunderstood) and his natural athleticism (hidden under tidily buttoned work shirts). The one thing I always knew was that he loved me, not because he told me, but because I saw it when he looked at me.

I see Dad in each of my boys, one kind and generous almost to a fault, one so quiet and thoughtful I can count the words he says out loud each day, one so steady and logical I often hope he’ll stray a bit off the path, and one so stubbornly proud, I smile when I see it in him.

He touched us all in his quiet way – for the better, despite it all, despite himself. He was loved, and he loved.

Loving and losing my Dad has taught me many things, and of them one important thing comes to mind each day. And that is – it turns out good old fashioned unconditional love never goes out of style, it allows for all things to be forgiven, understood and accepted. And that’s what a family really is, the rest of it, well, it just doesn’t matter, at all.