I had written about him often over the years, both directly and indirectly through the various figures of fathers or depictions of fatherhoods in poems and stories. Some of the poems, especially as he aged and I anticipated, with dread, his death, were poems that already mourned him, even if some of them were about the failures of our relationship as much as they were about its successes. I think he understood that all of them were gestures of love in its various forms, although he rarely discussed my work with me even though I sent him almost everything I published. When he died I think I expected myself to write some moving, extended song of mourning and praise. Certainly I had enough practice at it over the years, and nothing would have pleased me more than to make something worthy of him.
Some writers demand an epic of themselves and spend years preparing for the attempt.
Two things helped release me. The first was words from my father himself. In his late eighties he had written an autobiography, typing it out laboriously during his summers in our cabin in the Adirondacks, pecking away at an ancient Remington electric typewriter with letters so worn that a's and o's and e's were nearly indistinguishable. I had read it in a photocopy he gave me shortly before he died, a very cursory reading that was frustrated by the difficulties of deciphering. After he died and when my own writing was flagging, I decided one tribute I could perform would be to type the manuscript onto a disk and try to see if it might be published, or at least I could distribute it in legible copy to his friends and our relatives.