Tears For My Father

Wellington Morley Cramer, III

When I heard the words "tears for my father" on National Public Radio, I felt a stirring in my chest—but I didn’t know why. I wrote them down as a possible story.

As I kept trying to write, I realized I was holding a mental picture of my father when he was in assisted living quarters. I’d bought him a scarf from India that I’d sent in a tightly-taped, cut-up paper grocery bag to save money. Rather than wearing the scarf, he’d laid it over his dresser where he could see it every day, and for some reason, this pleased me enormously. He’d told me he’d had a "hell of a time" opening the package, and I’d heard my mistake.

Aging is changing me—not only physically, but mentally and emotionally, and with it, increasing my understanding of my father. Like him, I invent ways to compensate the losses and appreciate new perspectives. It may have been my needing scissors one day for the metallic packets of my supplements, that my fingers couldn’t fully tear open that first brought back the memory of the scarf package, and with it, fuller remorse than I’d felt that day. Why hadn’t I known better?

As a girl, my father was my hero—a tall one whose hand I held walking home from church—who taught me to catch a ball, and start the power mower. But being a woman, I realized that with his fine principles and his flaws, my father was one of my hardest teachers. It was his inability to understand me—at first frustrating—that ultimately would power my learning to understand myself, so I could teach him who I was.

My realization is, "We can move beyond why we didn’t do things differently in the past and be grateful for a change in present understanding."

Post Office of the Heart

I sat alone with a very young woman I didn’t know, during a brief rest from the conference we were attending. Something I said prompted her to tell me of her experiences of incest by her father.

She was here trying to love God. I remember wonderingly asking her how she was going to love God if she could not find healing with her father—as she’d said they were distant.

She listened quietly. I asked whether she would like to try a simple way of sending love to him that would help her healing. “Yes.” What did he like? “Cappuccino.” Could she imagine herself in a full skirt and a white peasant blouse making a cappuccino and sending it to him from her heart every day? She could.

Several years later, then in counseling practice, I was told by a slightly older, but still young woman that she wanted to come to me for my spiritual approach while she continued working with her therapist and her support group on the issue of rape.

Although my work with the young woman had been a brief moment, I hoped she, too, would seek therapy, while each day momentarily step away from a damaging experience by imagining her power to help heal both herself and her father through the energy of her heart—with something he loved that was comfortable for her.

Sending Johnny jump ups means—heart’s ease, heart’s delight, tickle-my-fancy, or jack-jump-up-and-kiss me.

My realization is, "We have powerful ability to send love in an image from the heart to one by whom we feel wronged for the purpose of healing our own heart, or to ones we’d like to post love to for the healing of their heart."

Singing With Grammie T

Illustration by Paul R. Sherburne

There was an upright piano in the farm living room with its sheer, white curtains that still allowed the bright, morning Maine light inside. The sheet music stood propped open: When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin Along, and I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.

My grandmother was Grammie, plump around the middle, wearing a bib apron over her house dress, her light gray hair a cap that rolled into a curl to softly frame her face, her narrow feet laced into black shoes with sturdy heels for support, and gold, rimless glasses her fingers trembled at putting on, while she asked us, "What have you young’uns been up to?"*

Her soprano voice warbled as her small hands, wrinkled and worn from work—but soft to touch—slid to press down the white and black keys making the music jump into the air. My sister and I had fun singing with Grammie.

I’m now older than Grammie, at that time. I say my prayers, which include singing each morning in a small lobby located on the first floor of my Indian home that’s there to protect the stairs from rain running under the roof veranda door. One morning, as I began to sing, I heard my Grammie T. singing along with me. I could see her, in her bib apron, in my inner vision. Surprise and joy widened my eyes. Of course she wouldn’t have known the song—yet across the dimensions that separated her soul and my human body she sang them. God and the masters of the universe, bringing her back to her granddaughter…

My realization is, "There is mystery, there is inner vision, there is imagination, and there is more beyond my awareness—and all understanding vanishes in a moment."

* A Flower for God