My father passed away 10 years ago today, March 15, 2008. It was an unusually mild March morning. He went for a bike ride, ordered seeds for the garden, wrote a few letters to the grandkids and mailed them. My mother planted the seeds alone later that spring. The stamped letters were opened after he had gone on ahead, as if the handwritten notes had arrived from the other side of the grave.

My father died of an aortic aneurysm. His last words were simply, Help me. It's one of the essential prayers any human can pray, the others being forgive me and thank you.

That year, it was the earliest Easter in about a century, so the funeral was actually held on a mid-March Good Friday, and the memorial service on Easter Sunday morning. The significance of that metaphor would not have been lost on my father.

I was called upon to write his obituary, and Karin and I sang an old hymn called Angel Band at the funeral. My Amish relatives arrived from far flung corners. They are no less busy than anyone else, they work as hard or harder as anyone else, and yet they drop everything if the need arises. My father's simple pine casket was built by hand by a local Amish carpenter.

My father passed away 10 years ago today. We lowered him into the earth high on a hill in Ohio, overlooking the family farms and rolling fields below. The funeral procession slowed to a crawl as if it had been choreographed: all the cars followed a horse and buggy up that final hill, a full circle return to my Dad's childhood.

My older brother Jonathan threw his reading glasses into the open grave. "Show us the way!" My sister Grace tossed in a handful of sweet gum tree seed pods, the fruit of my father's favorite shade tree.

I had received the news of my father's passing on the road in Birmingham. That's the phone call no touring musician ever wants to receive. No final goodbye, no word of gratitude.

After he was laid to rest, and Karin and I arrived back home on the farm, I remember not being able to get warm for a few weeks. Grief was a chill I couldn't shake. The warmth of Spring seemed like an impossibility.

Then one sunny morning, a mockingbird began singing outside of our bedroom window and woke us. We had never had a mockingbird on the farm before. It hung around that spring and summer and often followed us as we walked the dogs on the paths, or worked in the garden, or sat around an outdoor fire. It was an unusual and persistent bit of comfort.

Something with wings, singing.

Surprisingly I found that my relationship with my father continued to evolve after he was gone.

Gone not gone.

On a few occasions we eventually included the old hymn Angel Band in our Christmas concerts. We'll let that transmission go on out into the world again. Maybe somebody needs it.

Let the ones you love know you love them.

Linford Detweiler
March 15, 2018
Nowhere Else