I am so so sorry to hear of your enormous loss. Please accept my heartfelt condolences.

A few book suggestions well worth the read/re-read: Meg Meeker, “Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters” (’06) & “Boys Should Be Boys” (’08) and Christina Hoff Summers, “The War Against Boys” (’00).

I had two great parents. Mom was a Protestant Christian and Dad was an Atheist(Non-Preachy type). Neither ever turned the other cheek to bullies and my 3-year younger brother and I learned from their examples that you the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Period. I will ALWAYS Love the group motto of Dad’s B-29 Bomber Group in the Pacific War: WITH MALICE TOWARD SOME. (462nd B.G./ The Hellbirds)

Both Mom & Dad were well educated and loved history, literature and the Mountains. Hunting & Fishing and summer vacations in the High Sierras of Calif. I could shoot their .22 Rifles over their knees & fallen timber by 2-3-yrs. Trout fishing, the same in the high mountain lakes. I can still hear Mom, Dad and Pat when I stroll out among the tall pines around Twin Lakes & TJ Lake at Mammoth… I am haunted by high crags and waters.(Thank you, Norman Mc.)

Nena and I just returned from 2-weks in the Great Smoky Mtns. of N.Carolina and our beautiful “rental palace” on a hillside above the Little Tennessee River. Back in October. We lost our beloved son(my step son)on March 4th of this year(40-yrs old). That magic country helped restore the smiles to our sad hearts. R.I.P., Peter.

I’m grateful that he and my mother had a great marriage. I had a tough time with her, but they were our rock.

I have a brave daughter, 2 sons, 5 grandchildren, 3 siblngs, many 1st cousins, 2nd cousins, and many neices and nephews. We stand firm as family. We have a stronghold, a place of retreat. Do not tread on us. We will kill as many of your alphabet hordes of robot lackeys as we can. We will never wave the white flag.

We, and others like us, are a force that the leftists can not imagine. We are flyover country, land at your own peril.

Just a side note.

I loved Slouching Toward Bethlehem (Didion).

A little book of little essays, but so lovely.

And yet she turns out in real life to be not such a much.

What am I missing?

Let Them Alone by Robinson Jeffers.

If God has been good enough to give you a poet
Then listen to him. But for God’s sake let him alone until he is dead;
no prizes, no ceremony,
They kill the man. A poet is one who listens
To nature and his own heart; and if the noise of the world grows up
around him, and if he is tough enough,
He can shake off his enemies, but not his friends.
That is what withered Wordsworth and muffled Tennyson, and would have
killed Keats; that is what makes
Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art.

At’s what kills. It killed MA, I think. I hope not, but I think so. You have to run, like a crab.

http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-national-joke-or-national.html

Fathers can make all the difference.

Even if, as Plutarch said, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar were “successful” despite lacking a father, in a sense, so what.

They (fathers) go away, or they do not care. Is there an example anywhere in literature where the absence of a father is nothing? Probably, but I don’t know of one.

Coriolanus and Julius Caesar were great successes.

And fathers going away are often related to mothers hectoring them to go away, justifiably or not. Sometimes the mothers are just selfish and entitled, sometimes not.

A child does not know.

But the father leaving is a deep and lasting thing. There is no court of law or equity which can provide a remedy.

Is it possible, at the near end of life, for a human being to think, I miss my father? The father I never had?

And if it is possible, what does it mean?

Is there an immediacy to life overlooked by the grand theories?

Nicely done.

It also reminds me a bit of the sentiment in this Blake poem (which is about school, but the following two stanzas are the last two of the poem, and they could also apply to parental mistreatment of a child):

O! father & mother, if buds are nip’d
And blossoms blown away,
And if the tender plants are strip’d
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay,

How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?