[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))