The Final Meeting

My dad left me when I was just a little girl of three or four. I don’t remember much about that time period, other than the tears my mother and my older siblings shed. While they cried, I wondered why they were so sad. But I never found out until much later, when it was too late for me to look back and regret his departure. At that time, I had been more interested in trying to figure out why peppermint candies came in two different colors. Turning the thumbnail-sized candy around in my mouth, sucking on it over and over, I wondered - did the red stripes taste differently from the white? And so it was that while one of the possibly most momentous occasions in my life passed me by, my mind focused on the sweet mintiness in my mouth.

That penchant of mine to be distracted at the most inopportune times continued throughout the years, even after college. As my future husband kneeled before me, a beautiful princess-cut diamond in a platinum band sparkling at me from the palm of his hand, my thoughts turned to a question that had plagued me since the days of high school biology. If possessing six fingers was supposedly a dominant trait, then at what point in our evolutionary history did the recessive five fingers take over? You’d think that we’d all have six fingers. Perhaps even seven; it would certainly make playing the flute or the piano much easier.

But when I finally got the chance to meet my father again, after all the years I went without his guidance, love and support while growing up, my mind remained clear and attentive. I was finally old enough to comprehend the memory from countless decades past, when my family cried at his departure. I just wish that I had been told of his whereabouts sooner. It seemed unjust that as my mother lay dying upon the white sheets in the hospital emergency room, nurses anxiously hovering over her, she finally told me. He had been close to us all these years without me knowing it, barely a mile away from our house.

And so it was that a few hours after my mother let out her last breath I made the trek past our old house, the lawn uncut, weeds rampant, to meet my father for the first time in over sixty years. When I reached the destination, I slowly opened my car doors and stepped out. Opening the iron gates, I walked through the well-tended pathways until I found him. I could finally join my tears with those of my family that had been shed so many years past, as I kneeled and placed a small bouquet of roses upon his grave. My eyes closed for a few moments, as the tears trickled down my cheek. And then, wind blowing gently against my back as I got up and turned, I left.