Today is January 27th, 2021 and for the second time
, 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.
As readers of this blahg know, I lost my Father, George Henderson, on January 19th, 2019. It’s not a date I choose to celebrate. My friend Bryan reminded me that we shouldn’t remember the death but rather the life. I agree with that but an odd thing happened on January 19th this year. I had gone over to visit my Mother on that date and she asked me if I remembered what was significant about the day? I initially replied that I didn’t know, thinking I had forgotten something I promised to do for her on that day. Then I caught myself and realized that two years previous, Dad had passed away. I felt embarrassed because I had forgotten.
I realized that after Dad died that there would come a time when his memory wouldn’t be something that filled my every day. The first year was busy enough mourning him and dealing with his estate. 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. That last deed, of removing Dad from the Deed, hadn’t even occurred to me in the first year. 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. 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.
I won’t go on and on about the process of letting go of the memory of a loved one. It’s not a choice you make, it just happens. It doesn’t mean you forget that person but maybe it’s not a daily remembrance. There are days when you think about that person and then you wonder why you hadn’t thought about that person for a while. When I came home on January 19th, I reminded my wife that it had been two years since my Father had passed. She too was surprised that we hadn’t thought of it. It was no big deal. It wasn’t deliberate and, again, I didn’t want to celebrate the day we lost my Father. We went about our evening and we went to bed. I don’t even think we talked further about Dad that night.
Sometime that night, I guess it would have been early January 20th, I awoke with a start. I had been dreaming some unimportant dream and it didn’t even involve my Father. But suddenly, and clearly, I heard my Father call out my name. It was loud and clear and just the once. I sat up quickly in bed and then sat for a few minutes on the side of the bed. I was so startled. I have heard of these things happening to others and didn’t really believe in them. In my family, I have relatives who swear they have been visited by the spirits of departed loved ones. I thought it was bunk. Even one of my brothers maintains that he was visited by a vision of Dad. I dismissed his claim. But here was this event that shook me to my core. My wife woke up and asked me if I was okay. I told her I wasn’t. I told her what happened and I began to cry. I was ashamed that I had forgotten my Father. She held me and assured me that I hadn’t forgotten him or let him go. She was right, I hadn’t forgotten him but it was his voice that had left me.
When my Father died in 2019, it took me two weeks before I wrote a blahg about it, THE PASSING OF GEORGE ARTHUR HENDERSON. In that blahg I posted a handful of photos of my Father over the years. One of those photos was the one taken below of my parents at my wedding to Jeanette on May 30, 1987.
My Father had turned 50 on May 24th, 1987, just six days before my wedding. To be fair to my wife’s parents, here’s a photo from my wedding of Jeanette and I with hers and my parents:
I have lots of photos of my Father that I can cull from different sources. That isn’t the point of this blahg. 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. It has been more than two years since I’ve heard my Father’s voice. 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. I asked him if he was ready for that and he said “yes.” That is not the vocal memory I want to recall of my Dad.
I lay awake after hearing my Father call my name in the wee hours of January 20th of this year. I was trying to hold onto my Father’s voice. It got me thinking about what I had that might have recorded my Father. 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. That meant there was an audio cassette but I couldn’t remember when I last saw the tape. I searched for a couple of days for the tape before asking my wife about it. 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. In that drawer was a loose cassette labelled “Our Wedding”. Here’s an image of that tape:
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.
From that tape sprang to life my Father’s voice from more than 33 years ago. I want to present it here. It’s not easy to understand everything he said in his speech so I’m presenting a transcript below.
“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.
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.
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.”
Mr and Mrs Ploegman that my Father mentions in his speech are my in-laws Florence and Peter.
From over the years, my Father spoke to me again. It was a precious memory finding that cassette and being able to post it here. I started to think of what other medium might hold a recording of my Father’s voice. I’ve owned video cameras over the years but never remembered recording my Father. One memory I did recall was my Father’s voice on a video recording of my son Noah’s first Birthday. He was off camera but I remember him talking in the background. Here’s a clip of my son’s Birthday with my Father’s voice in the background:
My wife Jeanette is working the camera and my daughter Emily, then 4 years old, is seated next to him. Across the table are my niece Keri and my nephew Christopher. I had cats at home at the time, and for the record, I did not cook up one of the cats.
It was funny that when recalling this video I could remember exactly what my Father had said in the background about cooking up one of the cats. Again, another nice memory and another way for me to hear my Father’s voice. In that video were three generations of male Hendersons: Noah, myself (Scott) and my Father George. My son Noah will be 27 this year and he carries on the Henderson name passed from my Father to me to Noah.
I haven’t found any other videos or audio recordings but if I do I might just keep them to myself. This, after all, was to help me remember my Father’s voice. I heard him call my name about a week ago and I wanted him to know I heard him.
[…] “The Best of Everything”, I was reminded of another blahg I had written in late January MY FATHER’S VOICE where I talked about needing to find a cassette that contained my late Father’s voice. It […]