Family Poetry posted March 17, 2025

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The pain of losing someone who overshadowed your life

Requiem (For My Father)

by estory

Gutte nacht, mein Vatter, gutte nacht.

Your struggles in this world

Have come to an end.

Your are free from that stroke now,

And what it did to you;

You can talk and walk again

In the mornings, the way you used to;

You can eat the chocolate

And drink the glasses the wine

You used to enjoy; you can play chess

And listen to the Beethoven symphonies

You could no longer hear.

You are at rest.

Gutte nacht.

Now the world will have to do without

The movie screen frames you used to build;

The drapes and the curtains you hung

In all those restaurants and catering halls.

The world will have to do without

The meals on wheels you used to deliver

To shut ins and cripples stuck in their apartments,

The checks you quietly wrote

To hungry appalachian children

And wounded American veterans.

And this is what's left behind after decades

Spent with your shoulder to the wheel

So that we might have a better life

Out from under the mortal shadows

Of world war and the great depression:

Tools and tool boxes, drill presses, grindstones,

Workbenches, scraps of wood and fittings

That never made it into unfinished cabinets;

The catamaran you made from scratch,

Your home made telescope,

A chess set and a bible.

We whom you have left behind here

Have to make use of these things now.

So gutte nacht, mein Vatter; gutte nacht.

Somewhere out there, in a better world,

You are walzing with my mother again,

You are driving the Blue Ridge with her,

Or playing scrabble on a kitchen table,

Singing hymns in that old church.

So gutte nacht.

Somewhere out there you are sailing off

Across the Sound, making for Mount Sinai

Or climbing Kampenwand Mountain

All the way up to the Andromeda galaxy,

Or the moon.

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Gutte nacht mein Vatter is German for good night, my father. At the end of every night I spent taking care of him during his stroke, we said gutte nacht to each other. In the last stanza, the Sound refers to Long Island Sound, where my dad went sailing in his home made catamaran. Mount Sinai is the last harbor on the north shore of Long Island where we sailed in the summers when I was a kid. What I really found myself thinking of after my father died was all these little things he did in the world while he was alive, hanging drapes in catering halls that held so many weddings, lacing in movie screens on which countless people in the New York metro area watched so many movies, unaware of the work he did to allow them to do that. All the charity work he did behind the scenes. All these little pieces of lives that go so often unnoticed by the world at large. Death creates that hole in life, in the world, where this person once stood and worked his magic. But it is also a release from the pains and sufferings of things like stroke, which killed my dad. It is we here who are left behind, that have to reconcile all these things, during our time left here. Kampenwand Mountain is a mountain in the German alps I climbed with my dad on our trip there in 1982. estory

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The pain of losing someone who overshadowed your life

Requiem (For My Father)

by estory

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