Father's LAST WORDS
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In 1972, I was 25 years old following a strong impulse carrying me 1,500 miles.
I intended to find him - my Dad. He’d left when I was about half a year old.
His home in Detroit, Michigan had been the first house I lived in at age zero.
I knocked on his door and he answered.
The door opened and --there he was -- this man --He was my father.
“Yeah?”
“Are you Wesley Walstrom?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Terry Walstrom.”
“Oh? (He offered a stunned chuckle) You have the Walstrom chin—come on in.”
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Later - after all the small talk ...
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I finally had reached the moment when a flesh-and-blood Dad stood in the same room with me and I could inquire about the secrets of the universe.
“Why did you leave me?”
“Your mother wanted to fight. I hated fighting. I didn’t have the heart for fighting. So, I left.”
“I wasn’t worth fighting for?”
The expression on his face was a crucified Jesus.
“Terry-what can I say? The line between possible and impossible we each see differently. It was impossible for me to stay with your mother living with her parents, walking to work for forty cents an hour. Then fight and get up the next day. Impossible.”
“What did you say to me before you went away? My grandfather told me you whispered something.”
He looked me in the eye.
“Such as we are made of, such we be.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
To do a great right, do a little wrong.”
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A DYING LAST WORD
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The last letter I received—no, let me start again!
The only letter I ever received from my father, Wesley Walstrom, arrived in my mailbox over twenty years later.
It was addressed to me in shaky handwriting as might come from a person too ill to write.
I gazed with surprise at the return address. It was my father’s name and the same address where I had stood in 1972 listening to my Dad quoting Shakespeare.
My wife asked aloud, “Aren’t you going to open it?”
I took a deep breath. “No.”
I placed it on the mantle.
My father died within a year.
My Aunt Shirley called me and told me. He had been suffering from a degenerative bone disease for a long time. He was now at peace, she said.
I thanked her but didn’t mention the letter.
Why didn’t I want to open it?
Nothing that man could ever say to me could mean more to me than the last words he had spoken before he hugged me.
Even a warm “I’m sorry” wouldn’t mean anything.
Those two words are words my father never spoke.
He did the possible - not the impossible.
What more can you ask of a man?
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Postlude: Years and years later, after the birth of the Internet, I performed a search
For context and “meaning”...
“We know what we are, but know not what we may be” is a quote that features in Act IV, Scene 5 and is spoken by Ophelia. The quote is commonly cited as an example of madness, as King Claudius interprets it, and as a great example of one of the most important themes of the play—uncertainty.
However, that last line is from the Merchant of Venice and not Hamlet.
That conflation still puzzles me.