In memory of D.F. Rauber
My father died 53 years ago tonight. He was 42.
Just 42.
It was unfathomable at the time, and still is, really. That he died so young. That his talent was cut off so early: he was a gifted writer, teacher, scholar, student of languages and philosophy and history, and an original thinker, a batch of things that don’t always go together, even among the scholarly.
And before he got sick, when I was small, a talented story teller, entrancing his young children.
I’ve missed him ever since. Especially since I didn’t know him as well as I would have, I’m sure, had he lived longer, escaped his destiny.
He was ill — heart disease, caused in part by smoking and likely some freakish genetic predisposition — and at least in part because of that he sometimes suffered from depression. I was young, a teenager. It was that time when “the kids” and those “over 30” were at war, or thought they were.
So, distance.
There are so many things we could have talked about, should have talked about; could have learned from each other. I can’t help it sometimes when I feel a blip of envy for a friend or neighbor whose father is still with them, at 70, 80, 90 or more, when my Dad left us when I was 16, a junior in high school, just beginning to find out who I was.
Who was he?
All these years later, Donald Rauber is a mystery to me. I know and remember pieces so well — the way he ate an apple, savoring each bite, even the seeds, his immense love of books, of literature, of the Bible as a work of literature, of John Milton, of jazz and classical music, of sea chants and folk songs, of tromping in the woods, identifying wildflowers along the way, of my Mom and me and my three siblings, his short greying “salt & pepper” hair, the way he’d worry about his heart, worry about walking just enough each afternoon (when the pain wasn’t too bad) to keep his grim fate at least another day away, and keeping a small container of nitroglycerin in his pocket as he walked, the way he (alone of anyone I knew back then) compared the hubris of America’s war in Vietnam with the hubris of ancient Athens’ war in Sicily, more than 2,000 years prior.
I remember standing at the edge of the Pacific Ocean with him, in La Jolla, the two of us watching waves crash onto the shore. I was six or so. Across that ocean, he told me, thousands of unimaginable miles away, lay Japan and China.
All the mystery of the world seemed present, emmeshed or entangled somehow, in those crashing waves and thoughts of far off lands, places I may not have heard of before, and certainly didn’t understand.
Ten years later, he was gone.
Fathers are such a mystery when we are little and growing up in their shadow. So much we do not understand. And yet, so important for each little human to grow up with knowledge that a grown man loves us, cares for us, guides us.
Mothers do this, too, of course, but there is mystery of a father that is not the same as a mother since most of us know her more viscerally, more immediately, more profoundly as the one who keeps us alive as an infant ~ soft and warm and gentle, her voice soothing and sweet. But fathers are like the tall trees in a forest ~ shelter and strength and immense and unknowable to a young child.
I lost my father to heart disease when he was 59, not as "far too young" as your father, but still too soon, too young. He was planning to retire in six months and take an Alaskan cruise to celebrate. I had the good fortune (in retrospect) to be the one who cleaned out his house when he died. Going through so many papers and personal belongings gave me an insight that none of my siblings have, a deepness in my knowledge of the man he was privately, not even shown to his family. At first I was embarrassed and uncomfortable to know more of his secrets, but as four decades have passed and I have aged, I hold this as last special gift he gave me.
I appreciate this very much Chris. My father--also gone far too soon. You’ve honored your father with your remembrances over the years, and it helps me grieve as well. I grieve his loss from Jan 25, 1984.