But now, O LORD, thou [art] our father; we [are] the clay, and thou our potter; and we all [are] the work of thy hand. (Book of Isaiah)
On this 16th anniversary of my father’s death, one might think that the day could pass with just a slight remembering and a moving on – a kind of forgetting as the tasks of the day took over. Alas, that was not to be! From the beginning of this month, I started to think of this day approaching. Luckily for me, my Art class was this morning and I worked diligently at my clay creations. Vaguely, I remembered the Bible saying something about clay and decided to look it up. The above verse was one of the ones I found. My father was a “religious” man. He would approve of me looking things like this up.
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Remembering is what people do on days like these. We can’t forget the courage it took to live his life. Without my father and mother, I wouldn’t be here. They gave me life. My father taught me about the potter – the One in the Isaiah verse above. When I think back now, he never said he gave me life, nor my mother for that matter. He believed there was a Potter. This is my first experience working with clay and I am understanding first-hand what it means to form something out of clay. The clay has to be worked with and reworked until it becomes something pleasing to the potter.
Daddy was a work in progress as I am too. The Potter was still working with him. When I was a child, I saw him as someone who knew everything. When he grew older and I was older myself, I saw him “growing” in ways that surprised me. Many of us don’t associate change with people who are close to the end of their lives but I saw an openness in him that I had never seen before. He was still willing to learn. In his old age, he grew younger in his thinking. “We forget that ‘old’ in age typically does not mean ‘old’ in terms of relevance.” ― Craig D. Lounsbrough
The way an older person looks is often not how they feel. Physical decline or number of years does not take away the youthful spirit within that wants to sing, dance, play, and enjoy life to the fullest – each and every day. Our looks do not define us. There is a young person in every aged person.
As we visited the cemetery yesterday, I asked the Potter to take care of him. Although I’m not “religious” in the traditional sense of being called that, nevertheless this seemed the thing to whisper in my heart. This was for both my mother and father as they are buried together. The Potter is still at work and we are forever changing.
We haven’t forgotten you. Thank you, Daddy, for all the letters and poems you left for us. We feel closer to you when we read these. We remember that you lived. Thank you for teaching us about the Potter. You were a kind of potter with words.
“Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived …
My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real.
Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.” ― Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
It’s been good to express my feelings about this day and this time and about my father on this anniversary of the heart.
“Remembrance and reflection how allied!
What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide!”
― Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems