[This is a short read, 2 minutes at most. My bride lost her Dad’s physical companionship two weeks ago; final farewells were yesterday. Today, my old man would’ve been 105; I remember him and two brothers (one still with us) in an older post here, as their respective birthdays unfold, one-two-three. It’s always a poignant pause in the year for me. And what a weekend it was for my wife, son, sister-in-law, Aunt K, and for J and all their friends, grieving for her long-time partner. There were splendid words, and bird song, and this morning I am meditating on the “Requiem” of a mighty Scots poet, who lived only to the age of 44. Time, gentlemen, please!]

They were daughters without a Dad, a newly lonely sister (“he was a good brother”), and a fellow traveller who’d never lost a life partner before. They spread the ashes of this profoundly interesting man (my father-in-law, John Robinson Cartwright), blessedly released at age 88, among the waters and trails and under a leafy cathedral vault — on the point of land where he grew up, where his sister K still stubbornly lives, where Great Lake meets mighty river, where a few dozen old friends raised glasses and tributes and grateful laughter in the house that he and J built, from where two sisters embraced and went their distinctive ways.

And in a week where I dwell on the lives of my own Three Wise Guys, I add a fourth, my second father-in-law. I had a lot more time with John R. than with O. Kaye, but both were more mystery than father to me. My own Dad’s a bit like that, too, even 47 years on. And this morning I once again stumbled, nearly on purpose and always with a sigh, on this poem. Good morning to you! Good mourning, to us all.

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson (from Underwoods (1887))

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.