If I Saw You in Heaven

Today as the year of 2007 ends, I think of my father. His birthday was December 31, and he would have been 94 had he lived and not been unexpectedly shot as he sat at a bar in the Mississippi Delta in 1976. I am also thinking of him because my sister Judy sent me an electronic photograph from the late 1950's of our broken family sitting at a dining table for Christmas. Judy and I were both teenagers. She stands to the left of the photograph while our mother, I, and Daddy sit at the table. Our cousins are in the background. My father looks straight into the camera without a smile with those piercingly blue eyes of his. He has on a reddish color shirt with a sports jacket. He looks wonderful. Yet today, if I could ask of him any question, it would be that in Eric Clapton's famous song, "Tears in Heaven," "If I saw you in heaven, would you know my name?"

Our parents divorced in 1950 while Judy and I were quite small. He wasn't as if we never had a father because we knew of his existence. He simply was not around us but infrequently. We were not his only family even. He had married a young woman while he was in high school because she was pregnant with his twin boys, Billy and Bobby. He never lived with her, but in those days, it was essential that children "be given a name." He met our mother in 1937, some six years after he left his first family.

Judy and I have thought a long time about the reasons for our father's lack of responsibility for his four children and subsequent wives he married through the years. We simply have no answers for his neglect of us all. Yes, he was from a home that itself was rather tragic (his mother died when he was a baby, the aunt who raised him evidently was strict and mean, his father indulged his every wish), but is that enough to explain what he later became: a compulsive gambler, a thief, an alcoholic, and a womanizer?

Through the years, our father was around mostly to get a handout from Judy and me. He always needed money in order to catch the next boat down the river for another six weeks job as a deck hand on the Mississippi. He often came to our houses either drunk, suffering from what we called "the DT's," or hungover. The photograph Judy sent represents one of the few times he was in none of those conditions; it is priceless for that reason.

We wonder what life might have been without divorce, if we could have somehow managed to weather the crises and stay together as a family. Would our father know us then in heaven?