Fathers

It's strange how reactions sometimes erupt out of proportion to what we expect. Watching The Gilmore Girls with my daughters I suddenly burst into tears. I don't just mean a few trickles down my cheeks, I am talking full heaving eye shrivelling sobs. And it was a completely unexpected response. I was not in a particulary sad waiting for the excuse to cry frame of mind. And anyone who knows The Gilmore Girls American television series will know that in its amber toned images of a town where the harvest in everyone's kitchen is plentiful, porches are sofa and cushioned filled, abundance is everywhere even when it snows flakey white fluff. This is not a place for hysterical sobs but rather dab the corner of the eye with the pink velvet soft tissue.
But I sobbed. And it was when Richard Gilmore, grand patriach, husband of Emily, father to Lorelei, grandfather to Rory has a heart attack. In this world he is rushed immediately to hospital, has his own room where Rory brings his favourite jazz records and a portable turntable record player after immediate brilliantly executed heart surgery. And immediately I felt a geezer open up in my chest. Why?

I don't know.

But I do know it made me think of my father who had his first heart attack in his early forties and who died at the age of sixty-seven. He never had heart surgery. Someone he knew had a heart transplant and although the surgery was a success, mentally and emotionally he couldn't live with someone else's heart in his chest.
My father chose not to have surgery. Is this what upset me, that in Richard Gilmore's world it was so apparantly easy? I don't think so. I think it hit me that I miss dad and my daughters don't have, never knew in fact the wonderful grandad he would have been.