{"id":4038,"date":"2021-01-28T00:24:20","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T18:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/falseducks.com\/theblahg\/?p=4038"},"modified":"2021-01-28T00:24:20","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T18:24:20","slug":"my-fathers-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/falseducks.com\/theblahg\/?p=4038","title":{"rendered":"MY FATHER’S VOICE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today is January 27th, 2021 and for the second time\"Scott<\/a>, in a long time, in a single month, I’m going to put up another blahg. Twice in one month is a record I haven’t accomplished that often but if I’m going to make that 100 blahgs goal this year, then I’ll have to continue to double down.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 As readers of this blahg know, I lost my Father, George Henderson, on January 19th, 2019.\u00a0 It’s not a date I choose to celebrate.\u00a0 My friend Bryan reminded me that we shouldn’t remember the death but rather the life.\u00a0 I agree with that but an odd thing happened on January 19th this year.\u00a0 I had gone over to visit my Mother on that date and she asked me if I remembered what was significant about the day?\u00a0 I initially replied that I didn’t know, thinking I had forgotten something I promised to do for her on that day.\u00a0 Then I caught myself and realized that two years previous, Dad had passed away.\u00a0 I felt embarrassed because I had forgotten.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I realized that after Dad died that there would come a time when his memory wouldn’t be something that filled my every day.\u00a0 The first year was busy enough mourning him and dealing with his estate.\u00a0 Last year there was less to do with his final taxes having to be filed and then having to meet with a lawyer and remove Dad’s name from the title of the house.\u00a0 That last deed, of removing Dad from the Deed, hadn’t even occurred to me in the first year.\u00a0 It wasn’t until we tried to renew my Mother’s small mortgage left on the house that we were informed by the bank that it couldn’t be done until the house was solely in her name.\u00a0 That was finally accomplished last fall and what with the Covid 19 pandemic, Christmas, and daily life, I didn’t realize that Dad’s memory was no longer in the forefront of my mind.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I won’t go on and on about the process of letting go of the memory of a loved one.\u00a0 It’s not a choice you make, it just happens.\u00a0 It doesn’t mean you forget that person but maybe it’s not a daily remembrance.\u00a0 There are days when you think about that person and then you wonder why you hadn’t thought about that person for a while.\u00a0 When I came home on January 19th, I reminded my wife that it had been two years since my Father had passed.\u00a0 She too was surprised that we hadn’t thought of it.\u00a0 It was no big deal.\u00a0 It wasn’t deliberate and, again, I didn’t want to celebrate the day we lost my Father.\u00a0 We went about our evening and we went to bed.\u00a0 I don’t even think we talked further about Dad that night.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 Sometime that night, I guess it would have been early January 20th, I awoke with a start.\u00a0 I had been dreaming some unimportant dream and it didn’t even involve my Father.\u00a0 But suddenly, and clearly, I heard my Father call out my name.\u00a0 It was loud and clear and just the once.\u00a0 I sat up quickly in bed and then sat for a few minutes on the side of the bed.\u00a0 I was so startled.\u00a0 I have heard of these things happening to others and didn’t really believe in them.\u00a0 In my family, I have relatives who swear they have been visited by the spirits of departed loved ones.\u00a0 I thought it was bunk.\u00a0 Even one of my brothers maintains that he was visited by a vision of Dad.\u00a0 I dismissed his claim.\u00a0 But here was this event that shook me to my core.\u00a0 My wife woke up and asked me if I was okay.\u00a0 I told her I wasn’t.\u00a0 I told her what happened and I began to cry.\u00a0 I was ashamed that I had forgotten my Father.\u00a0 She held me and assured me that I hadn’t forgotten him or let him go.\u00a0 She was right, I hadn’t forgotten him but it was his voice that had left me.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 When my Father died in 2019, it took me two weeks before I wrote a blahg about it,\u00a0THE PASSING OF GEORGE ARTHUR HENDERSON<\/a>.\u00a0 In that blahg I posted a handful of photos of my Father over the years.\u00a0 One of those photos was the one taken below of my parents at my wedding to Jeanette on May 30, 1987.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

My Father had turned 50 on May 24th, 1987, just six days before my wedding.\u00a0 To be fair to my wife’s parents, here’s a photo from my wedding of Jeanette and I with hers and my parents:\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

I have lots of photos of my Father that I can cull from different sources.\u00a0 That isn’t the point of this blahg.\u00a0 Waking up in the middle of the night and hearing my Father call my name reminded me that one of the things that goes first is the sound of a person’s voice.\u00a0 It has been more than two years since I’ve heard my Father’s voice.\u00a0 The last memory of him speaking to me was in the hospital when I told him that the Doctor stated that there was no quality of life for him and that she recommend we let him go.\u00a0 I asked him if he was ready for that and he said “yes.”\u00a0 That is not the vocal memory I want to recall of my Dad.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I lay awake after hearing my Father call my name in the wee hours of January 20th of this year.\u00a0 I was trying to hold onto my Father’s voice.\u00a0 It got me thinking about what I had that might have recorded my Father.\u00a0 There were no videos of my wedding but I remembered that I had provided my brother Dan with a small tape recorder to record the service and the speeches at my wedding in 1987.\u00a0 That meant there was an audio cassette but I couldn’t remember when I last saw the tape.\u00a0 I searched for a couple of days for the tape before asking my wife about it.\u00a0 She pointed me to a drawer I had forgotten about that contained an odd assortment of burned Sinatra CDs that I had received from other collectors as well as a loose collection of cassettes.\u00a0 In that drawer was a loose cassette labelled “Our Wedding”.\u00a0 Here’s an image of that tape:\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Audio<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s not only a collector’s item for Our Wedding but we haven’t had a Kmart here in Canada in more than 20 years.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 From that tape sprang to life my Father’s voice from more than 33 years ago.\u00a0 I want to present it here.\u00a0 It’s not easy to understand everything he said in his speech so I’m presenting a transcript below.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\nhttp:\/\/falseducks.com\/theblahg\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/dad.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

“I want to thank everyone for coming and Mr and Mrs Ploegman for making this all happen. Unfortunately Scott doesn’t realize it but I do know where he is tonight because the hotel call me to make sure he had his reservations all right.<\/em><\/h4>\n

When Scott was a school boy I thought I could teach him something. When he was six years old we had an awful battle when he went to school, he wouldn’t come home. He kept staying at school and I swore every noon hour I ran home and I thought after he got a good enough licking he wouldn’t stay at school again. But what’s he do? He wants to be a teacher and he’s marrying a teacher and he’s going to be in school all the way.<\/em><\/h4>\n

I really appreciate you Jeanette for coming to our family because we need another daughter. Boys, we’ve got five of them. So that’s about all I’ve got to say and thank you all very much for coming.”<\/em><\/h4>\n

Mr and Mrs Ploegman that my Father mentions in his speech are my in-laws Florence and Peter.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 From over the years, my Father spoke to me again.\u00a0 It was a precious memory finding that cassette and being able to post it here.\u00a0 I started to think of what other medium might hold a recording of my Father’s voice.\u00a0 I’ve owned video cameras over the years but never remembered recording my Father.\u00a0 One memory I did recall was my Father’s voice on a video recording of my son Noah’s first Birthday.\u00a0 He was off camera but I remember him talking in the background.\u00a0 Here’s a clip of my son’s Birthday with my Father’s voice in the background:\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n