The Bible reading for the day seemed well-suited for remembering Dad.
Jonah tries to avoid his mission by boarding a ship heading in the opposite direction of Nineveh. Dad often boarded boats and ships in his life, working as an electrician for the Coast Guard district of New England at one point. He’d go up and down the coast, out to lighthouses and light buoys, on sea craft and base housing, loving the camaraderie and sometimes bringing my friend Scott and me to play volleyball with the men in the dune-surrounded stations on Cape Cod.
My cousin Larry recalled, just before my Dad’s funeral a year ago, how as a young boy he saw my father standing at full height on a stormy day, in a boat that carried him, another cousin and me. Dad held onto the bottom of the iron beam of a highway bridge as he stood, so that he could work the boat to shore. It was difficult, and we were scared at the wind and water, but my father looked every inch an Olympian god to my cousin as he slowly brought us close to a rocky shore and we alighted to shore.
We went through sailboat phases, as a family, for years at a time, especially when we finally moved to the Cape and built a couple of houses on the shores of the saltwater inlet, Eel Pond. Dad bought a beautiful 14-foot English Wayfarer, and sailed mostly on the Pond—the connecting channel to Buzzard’s Bay flowed narrowly under a road bridge, leaving far too little space for the tall mast. Not that Dad didn’t try. Fortified by a beer too many, he did try to sail nearly sideways underneath it one time, with hilarious results. My Uncle Paul, his younger brother, who didn’t swim, was with him, but never even got his cigar wet! The incident passed into family lore.
Jonah’s ship enters stormy waters. In the reading, I noticed as if for the first time that Jonah’s shipmates, although not needing any convincing from Jonah that he was the cause of their desperate straits, took their time decided whether or not to throw Jonah overboard in order to save their skins. They waited, and didn’t want to take the decision. Finally, with appeals to God not to hold the crime of taking a human life against them, they accede to Jonah’s suggestion and deliver him to the sea. I had forgotten what scruples they had, even in the midst of a clear and present danger, about taking a human life and risking having the load of such a heavy sin on them. Perhaps Jonah was even admired and loved by them, much as Dad could inspire and arouse affection in any group of people, even when he didn’t speak their language. The reticence they felt about separation from Jonah mirrored, in a way, the strength of connection that many people felt they had with Dad, and couldn’t easily set aside when the inevitable hour of departure arrived.
It’s been a year, and I myself find it a task of much time, to finally set aside the connection I feel with Dad. I’m not even sure what that means—how to set aside the connection of father and son. I don’t feel that my grief is keeping me from living my life fully, but it is still there, and can bring tears to my eyes and a lump in my throat on many occasions, including the Mass I celebrated on Dad’s first anniversary, just last Monday morning. Dad, like Jonah, would encourage me to let him go overboard, but I linger, I want to hold on, I’m afraid of the calm that will descend afterwards—bringing me home to port, but leaving stormy challenges and a nearness to vitality behind, as Dad goes on to his mission, and I to mine.
