Papa

Today my father would have turned 75. I have been working through a kaleidoscope of grief for the past 7 months – brief bright pangs of loss, doubt, anger, gratefulness and laughter.

This is the last photo I have of him and me. We had inadvertently worn the same outfit. Amber thought it was pretty funny so she had us pose. It’s ironic that now I have assumed the responsibilities my father had on this beautiful property on the edge of the continent, not only filling his work boots, but sleeping in his bed, wearing his sweaters, cleaning his chainsaw, and paying his bills. I didn’t manage to save the phone number.

It was easy for Amber and I to make the decision to quit our teaching contracts in Calgary and move our entire lives to New Brunswick after my father passed away in January. We finished out the year, selling our condo and graduating our youngest in the process. We zoomed across the Canadian summer landscape and arrived to a lush property, resplendent with massive nut trees, cherry and apple trees dripping with fruit, blueberries ready to pick and a mess of grapevines pleading to be pruned. We planted a late garden in the first couple days as I got my father’s tiller going and as I installed the hydraulic ram pump I built with him a couple summers ago.

My father should have had a little pick-up truck and a tractor for all the work he did around the 61 acres. Instead he had a fancy SUV and a little side-by-side. I bought a small tractor and a little old loud truck in my first month here – we use the side-by-side a lot, so we will keep that. He was impatient, so he probably would have hurt himself or something with a tractor.

But now it’s maintenance and catching up on all the maintenance my father couldn’t do when he was being weakened and taken over by cancer the previous two years. He had decided against more rounds of chemotherapy to treat the multiple myeloma he was diagnosed with in the fall of 2022 favouring instead to beat the cancer with a targeted diet. Last summer, I noticed that he was better than the summer before, but still not putting on body mass and nowhere near as strong as he was before the cancer. Not long ago he was a septuagenarian who cut his own firewood and kept a large vegetable garden. He was doing in-depth studies on the history and differences between the Aaronic and Mosaic priesthoods and presenting them online to a cohort of like-minded Old Testament feast observers. He had dreams and visions for the future.

My sisters and I had him cremated in January and we prepared a funeral service 5 days after he passed. It provided significant closure to hear his old hippy friends and young church friends get up and share their memories and feelings for the man who shared so much life with them. I shared the eulogy, purposefully keeping it on the positive side and steering clear of the consistent conflicts I had with him. We rarely clashed until about 10 years ago when he really dug into his views on powers and principalities and biblical interpretation that in my view were quite harmful. Soon after his late wife passed away in 2018, my father became consumed with fear-driven (and profit-motivated) YouTube videos and a newspaper that I regarded as poison for the soul and society in general. It became difficult to want to call him when I knew he couldn’t help but bring something up that I also couldn’t help but react to. Visiting him in the summers brought things to a head on a weekly basis. We would huff and puff and eventually make up. Our relationship weathered the storms, but it also fractured.

I’m at his desk now, writing about him. He built this desk which has floor tiles on the surface and custom drawers that are about 5 mm too narrow to keep letter-sized paper in them. He was a builder and he loved the challenge of building with materials he had collected from job sites – either left-over or old materials that were heading to the landfill. More recently, he would scavenge all sorts of things (especially tables and doors which fill half the garage) from the ReStore (Habitat for Humanity) in Moncton. He built three guest cabins which from the outside are the cutest cabins – they look like giant birdhouses. On the inside the practical design suffers and this is where we again had conflict. I asserted that purpose and beauty had to dominate the design process whereas he insisted that form depended on the building materials available.

But build he did. Two log houses from the ground up. A church – building and body – from scratch. Classrooms in Belize. He transformed his father’s woodshed into a cottage and continued to build onto it – which is where Amber and I have moved in. He built a geodesic dome greenhouse which is the jewel of the property. And then the garden shed. And an outhouse and outdoor shower. And expansive bookshelves in the garage which he filled from used book stores. The vineyard, berry bushes, apple/cherry/nut/pear trees were not here 22 years ago when he moved here from Alberta to care for his widowed mother.

My father grew up on the margins – edge of a continent, part of a minority language group, poor. He pushed past some limitations though. He was the only person in his family to graduate high school. He apprenticed and studied to become a journeyman carpenter. Then he earned a bachelor’s degree in his second language. I remember as a child while he was doing his pre-ministry degree that he was consistently frustrated as a man in his mid-30s having to fit his ideas into quite narrow academic measures. He tried to fit in though, on into his 40s. But he was always the one in a shabby suit or with the awkward dinner manners or the inappropriate comments or the unmastered accent on the English language or the fascination with the less credible subjects. He was never welcomed into the halls of power or academia. I think he felt that rejection. I think it hurt.

That rejection to the margins is also what fashioned my father’s generous heart. He never didn’t stop for a hitch-hiker if there was room in the car. He brought them home too – for the night or for meals or for a couple weeks. Following in his father’s footsteps, he visited the recluses and the poor and the sick. Locally, he could hobnob with the self-made millionaires as well as the alcoholics living in mobile homes. I remember being fascinated when he had a load of lumber delivered and the truck driver stuck around for no less than an hour to chat with my father. I was at his mechanic’s last week and he mentioned how smart my father was – probably due to a lesson he received on the influence the Jesuits continue have on culture while simultaneously installing brakes. A young Haitian woman spoke at the funeral and shared how my father would take her and her university friends to his place after church and feed them and give them their first canoe ride and be the one to help them move. A person on the margins of power and culture was able to see the humanity in the people on the margins. Not an unfamiliar story for a Christian.

I don’t really want to stop writing about this character who had such a profound impact on my life. It feels like it might be too final when I click the Publish button. Papa bought me my first, second, and third guitars. And paid for years of lessons. Classical guitar was my initial major in university. In 2019, he backpacked 350 km for a month with me and his grandson around the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland – the first time any of us had visited that magical province. Today, I harvest his apples and his blackberries. I will make wine with his grapes. I can do a pretty great impression of him too, even when I’m not trying. He blessed me as my wife and I were leaving the church denomination where both he and I earned degrees and worked as pastors. We were leaving to be missionaries in Guatemala and on the phone he told me the I had become far more at the age of 29 than he had at that age. That sticks with me. I can already say the same about both of my kids.

He didn’t care for birthdays. Because of something he read about birthday candles, he was quite against them. He didn’t send birthday cards to his kids, let alone call them on their birthdays. He might even be surprised that it was his own birthday when one of his children called. But he would dutifully hand out cash to grandkids who celebrated their birthdays in the summer and who happened to be visiting – he would also recognize that the other grandkids present hadn’t received anything for their birthdays, so all the kids would get cash. Regardless, had he still been alive today I think we would have bought him a cake or Acadia would have baked one. He would have been delighted. He would have eaten it while also humming. And he would have had another piece at breakfast tomorrow. 75 years ago, a force of humour and justice, a powerful light of love and generosity, a lifelong learner was born to my grandparents. And cheers to that.