This column will be an unusual one.
Today my wife and I are heading down for my daughter Emily’s graduation from college on Saturday. We’ve got a four-bedroom Airbnb through Tuesday, and we’ll be joined by Katie and her husband, Karen’s two brothers, and one of my cousins. After the graduation, we’ll be having an early Christmas with Katie and Ryan, since they’ll be back in Denver and working on Christmas Day.
In other words, we’ll be making rather merry for the next four days, and I won’t be posting my usual column on Monday. But I’ve got some things on my mind that I thought I’d share before leaving town.
December is my favorite month of the year, and after the relief of Trump’s win last month, this has been an easier year than usual to get into the Christmas spirit.
We’ve got the tree and lights up, and last weekend we saw the town tree-lighting – with carolers, horse-drawn wagon rides and luminaries lining the streets – in an old hotel where Robert Frost spent his last winters, in one of our town’s oldest neighborhoods. The advent services at church have been great, and the weather has cooperated by giving us enough cold nights to justify having a few fires in the fireplace.
But I’m also reminded of the bittersweetness of the Christmas season for many, especially older people. The sweetness is obvious, especially for Christians, for whom the holiday marks the pivot-point of human history.
But the bitterness is there too, because for most of us Christmas is the most nostalgic of holidays, and nostalgia always combines happy remembrance with the ache of loss. If you had a reasonably happy childhood, some of your best memories invariably involve Christmastime and the traditions and people you loved, magnified through the rosy lens of your own innocence.
The older we get, the greater the chances that the holiday also carries bad memories of tragedies that happened around the holidays, the pain made sharper by the jarring confluence of a happy event – a birthday, an anniversary – with a devastating loss. After you’ve lived a while, you’ll inevitably have some poignantly empty chairs around your Christmas table.
I’m thinking about this now because tomorrow is both Emily’s graduation day, and the tenth anniversary of my dad’s death.
Ten years seems like a perfect amount of time to illustrate how strangely time works on us. By the time you’re middle aged, events from a decade ago alternately feel like they happened eight months ago, or in a different lifetime.
(It’s disorienting. I mean, I’d guess that Kurt Cobain died around 10 years ago, around the time when Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But no. Cobain died thirty years ago, and Biden was still in the race 6 months ago!)
I think it was C.S. Lewis who cited this kind of alienating strangeness in the way we perceive time as, if not dispositive proof of the soul’s immortality, at least a persuasive indicator of it. He used the analogy that fish are not constantly surprised by the water they live in, but we are constantly surprised – fooled, and vexed, and startled – by our experience of time. We are created for immortality, and this current life hints at that fact constantly.
So on the one hand, I wish dad could be there to watch my astrophysicist daughter walk across that stage tomorrow. And on the other, I know that he will be. And that the only reason he’s not as proud of her as I am, is that it’s not possible for anyone else to be as proud of her as I am!
Okay, I said that this would be an unusual column, and I think I’ve delivered on that. So I’ll finish the same way.
I wrote a remembrance of my dad for Father’s Day in 2017, which now seems like 6 months ago. (See what I mean?) I’ve re-posted it on a couple of Father’s Days since then, and I’m happy to say that thinking of him these days brings back nothing but good feelings.
I’m reposting it here for one last time before retiring it for good. Whether you’re a newcomer to the CO site and haven’t seen it before, or you’re seeing it one more time, I hope that even though it’s not the least bit Christmas-y, it will help you to appreciate the time you’re able to spend with your family this Christmas.
From June, 2017:
“As this Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad. He died not long before Christmas in 2014, and time has been doing its work, to the point that thoughts of him have shifted over to a mix of many happy memories of him, to go along with the pain of his loss. I’m a father to two daughters, and have known hundreds of other fathers as friends, relatives, co-workers and acquaintances, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who carried out that role any better than my dad.
He was born into a family of four boys and four girls to working class parents in Illinois in the late 1930s. He married my mom not long after high school, and had me and my younger sister, and raised us while working at the Northern Illinois Gas Company, until he was forced into an early retirement at the age of 57 by injuries. He operated a variety of heavy equipment, and he took great pride in his work.
When I was little, I can remember him pointing out subdivisions or houses that he’d run services to, and whenever we’d pass a parking lot with heavy machinery, he’d brag that he could operate anything on that lot. My mom had to explain to an excited young me (at maybe age 5 or 6?) that no, she was not going to let dad scratch my back with his backhoe. (He’d assured me that he could do so, no problem.)
He was not perfect, as none of us are. He could be short-tempered and impatient, for example. But even then, he was the most unusual of people: he was a short-tempered man whom I never heard swear. Not once in my life. Not when he bounced a hammer off his thumb. Not when the Bears or the Cubs went O-for-a-month. Not when a Democrat got elected.
He used ridiculous euphemisms to avoid cursing – “son of a buck,” “dirty rip,” and the like – but as a grown man who rarely makes it across town in heavy traffic without dropping at least one trenchant Anglo-Saxonism at one of my many brain-dead fellow citizens who cannot seem to master a turn signal or figure out which lane is for passing, that’s almost more than I can comprehend.
People are freaking idiots all the time — I am too — and my dad was surrounded by them his entire life, but he never swore in front of his son!
In the summer of 2014 dad had cancer surgery that we initially thought had been successful. But a month or so later we found out that it had metastasized, and a month after that we learned that it would be fatal. I spent much of the fall of that year with my mom and dad in Tennessee, and I’ll always be grateful for that time. I recorded dad sharing a lot of memories from his life, and I saw the evidence of how many lives he had touched in the form of a steady stream of visitors who came to see him, and to see what they could do for him and for my mom.
He kept his sense of humor throughout his final illness. One of my cousins was visiting not too long before dad died. That cousin is known for sarcasm and smart-assery – even by Simpson standards – and he has some Scottish background on one side. Dad was sitting in a recliner and drifting in and out of the conversation, and the cousin was joking that he was going to try to learn the bagpipes. He promised (tongue-in-cheek) to play them at dad’s funeral.
Dad delivered his line with a perfectly dry tone: “That’s it. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not dying.”
Dad died on a Sunday evening, and he told me his last joke two days earlier. He and I had both been Chicago Bears fans for life, and the Bears really stunk in 2014. In the last couple of months in that season, they were on tv unusually often for a team that bad. On the final Thursday of dad’s life they were on Thursday Night Football, and dad and I watched from our dueling recliners. He was pretty heavily medicated and drowsed on and off; each time he woke up a bit, he’d ask me the score, and I’d report that the Bears were down by another touchdown or so, and he’d roll his eyes and make some comment before sliding back to sleep.
The next day, he asked me for a favor. He had been unable to make it to church for a while by then, but his church made each week’s services available on DVD for members who had been unable to make it on Sunday. Dad had several of those stored up to watch, and on that Friday, he asked if I could put a DVD in for him. He seemed a little drowsy, but I put in the DVD and handed him the remote, asking if he thought he could stay awake for the sermon.
“I’m not sure,” he said, “But I don’t want the last tv I ever watch to be that stinking Bears’ game last night.”
To end his good life, he died a good death. He had hospice care in his home, and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and I spent some time with him every day in his final months. He had the chance to tell everyone he knew how much he loved them, and that he was ready to go, and he was solicitous of others at a time when most of us can focus only on ourselves. Because of great hospice workers and morphine (which by itself is proof to me that God exists, and that He loves us), he was able to die at home.
He slept for most of his final day. In the evening, mom and I arranged a schedule; I would stay up with him, and give him morphine twice, and then she would get up early and administer the morphine while I was sleeping in. She spoke to him the last time, kissing him and telling him that he had been a great father and husband, and that he could go. Then she went to bed, and I’m convinced that he passed before she fell asleep. I had some papers to grade, so I went down the hallway to get my computer, and brought it back to set up in the chair next to his. By the time I got the computer plugged in and checked on him, he was gone.
Ronald Lee Simpson was born on January 22, 1938, and died on December 14th, 2014. In between he lived a loving and generous life. I think it is hard for some people to come to faith in a loving heavenly Father if they have an abusive, or neglectful, or absent earthly father. I am a Christian because of both of my parents, but my path to God was made much easier by the example of a father’s love that I witnessed all my life.
I can’t wait to see him again.
I wish for you all that you have had a father like mine, or that you marry a father like mine, or that you are a father like mine. Happy Father’s Day!”
…and Merry (early) Christmas, everybody!
Martin Simpson 
A lot of dust in the air as I read this, Mr. Simpson.
And a Mele Kalikimaka to you and yours,
Rod Grannemann
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