“I never really knew what he felt, but I knew where he stood.”

My father would have been 99 years old today. He died in 2009, and I miss his devoted presence, a presence grounded in duty as the fundamental expression of his love for his faith, his family, and his country. His legacy is infused, not with his words, but with his actions, actions guided by the principles that promises must be kept, that commitments must be honored, that showing up is non-negotiable, and that feelings are less important than deeds. He was not an easy father, but he was steadfast, sometimes intolerably, sometimes tenderly.

I never really knew how he felt, but I always knew where he stood. For instance, he hated Bob Dylan, not because of his activist lyrics, but because he couldn’t actually sing. He believed in the parental philosophy of blind obedience, not because he craved power, but because he believed that order equated calmness, which in a household of 9 is most likely true. He never said he loved me, not because he didn’t, but because showed it every day when got up and worked long hours to support my life.

He was impatient and stalwart and could be quick to anger. He was also kind and encouraging and generous. He taught me that loving someone, and being loved by someone, is made real by an attention to personal responsibility, self-sacrifice, courage and tenacity. He loved my mother in a deep and sometimes turbulent way, believing that his first responsibility was to her and together they were responsible for all of us.

He was smart and creative; engineering his profession, painting his avocation. He loved “projects” and travel and reading out loud, and swimming in lakes, and skiing, and mustangs (the cars), and big houses with big views and cottages and cabins. He loved the Midwest where he was born; and Canada and Cleveland and New Jersey and New York where he had his career; and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts where the family cottages were built; and he came to love Oregon where he retired, and where he died, and where he is buried next to my mother.

He suffered but he did not bring that suffering into my life. He and my mother kept their life as husband and wife intensely private. His heart was surely broken many times; multiple miscarriages, the death of a child, the challenges faced throughout the lives of his many children, the terrible years of watching my mother suffer and die from Alzheimer’s, his own illness. But his gaze, their gaze, was not focused on the darkness, but on the promise, grounded in their faith, that the light is always stronger than the darkness, and that faithfulness in this life would lead to joy in the Eternal. He was, at his core, a faithful servant to his God and to those to whom he had pledged his life.

He taught me how to live, and in the end, he taught me how to die and as the years pass, I find myself remembering him more, missing him more, and cherishing him more.