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Those who have lost their dads should celebrate fathers' lives

By ROSS RUNFOLA
as published in the Buffalo News
June 20, 1999

Death is always painful to contemplate, easy to ignore. Most people do not think much about their own deaths. Rather, they look at how it affects the lives of others.

So, in the words of Anton Chekhov, "To whom shall I tell my sorrow?" on yet anothers Father's Day without my dad. Let me please talk to those sons and daughters, who, like me, mourn their fathers' deaths on a day when others are celebrating.

My father, Joseph P. Runfola, died the night of October 31, 1996, Halloween. To me, Halloween used to symbolize laughing children at the door in colorful costumes. It will no more. On this Halloween, the sound of young children yelling "trick or treat" could not dam up either the flood of tears that clouded my eyes or the memories of my father.

As the bell kept ringing, I remembered Dad's life in no special order. My father moving juries to tears with his spellbinding eloquence and striking good looks. His coming home after a hard day of work on the coal truck and telling stories of a wide-eyed 8-year-old on the faded couch in our Niagara Street flat. My father's great courage and humor after a stroke stole his once golden tongue.

My dad appeared to me to be a giant of a man, both physically and mentally, even in the latter years when his health was failing. Although I am now a man, I view Dad with the eyes of a child. Dad seemed indestructible, larger than life, as a lawyer and as a person, not only to me, but to everyone he touched.

The stirring News obituary that described his many accomplishments, including being the most outspoken president in the history of Erie County Bar Association, appeared to only leave out the alleged hom run Dad hit as a youth off future Hall-of-Fame pitcher Warren Spahn.

On Father's Day, just before his death, I gave Dad an autographed Warren Spahn Milwaukee Braves hat. Whenever I visited my parents in their transplanted home in San Francisco and Dad put on the hat, it transformed his aging face into the granite and chiseled visage of the young athelete he once was. Now, on Father's Day, I stare at his baseball cap and silently tell myself that I should be happy because unlike many other children, I had a Dad until he turned 81. Call me selfish - I wanted him for another 81 years.

God almost took my father when I was a small child. He suffered a severe heart attack. Then, shortly after I started law school, a stroke at the height of Dad's public success ended his law career.

But by so doing, God, in his infinite wisdom, enabled Dad to spend more time practicing life rather than perfecting work. Although he never lost his place at the judicial table, he was finally brought back full time to the family table so that his grandchildren, like his children before them, could benefit from his wit, wisdom and great appetite for life, as well as from steaming plates of pasta.

I was prepared for my father's death six years ago (if one can ever be prepared) when I received a call from my brother that Dad was rushed to the hospital from his favorite San Francisco restaurant. At least, I rationalized, Dad died near his greatest loves - my mother and linguine with clam sauce.

God, however, chose not to take Dad until he had a chance to return with my Mom to Buffalo to attend a family wedding so he would have a last chance to say goodbye to friends and family. A fortnight after the wedding, Dad was dead.

And so it is. We are born, we marry, and we die. The chain of life continues. So join me this Father's Day - not in weeping for our parents' deaths - but in joyful celebration of their wonderful lives.

We are truly blessed this Father's Day because unlike those children whose fathers are still living, we can reminisce about the totality of our parents' great gifts to us. This knowledge gives poignancy to our fathers' lives, and to our own.

ROSS T. RUNFOLA is an attorney and a professor of Social Sciences at Medaille College.