Our Father

    He was not an emotional man. Most men did not show emotion back then. But his parents' headstone (later also his), shows that his mother and father died the same year, 1930. Our father would have been 36 years old.  Of course, as children, we thought that anything that had happened before we were born might as well have been in the Dark Ages. Actually, though, it was well  less than a decade later.
    The first time I ever saw my father with tears in his eyes was in our House, in the "middle room."  He was making a rare reference to his mother. Maybe it was her birthday or the anniversary of her death. I would have been too young to be aware even if I'd heard. He was talking to my mother about what a hard death his mother had, how much she had suffered before she died, from cancer in her neck and face. I think I left the room, scared  of his emotion. I never heard him mention her again.
    He cried when his sister Lizzie died. I remember him siting at the supper table, somber and serious. Our mother told us not to talk, not to say anything. I think she whispered to us why he was sad.
   I'm not sure of the time sequence. I suppose I could look it up somewhere, but it doesn't matter. He grew emotional, tears in his eyes, when it was announced that FDR had died.
   The last time I saw him cry was when his youngest brother Frank unexpectedly died. He'd gone to the hospital for routine hemorrhoid surgery. His daughter was a nurse at a different hospital, but it seems she had been with him. My parents visited him in the hospital after the surgery. He told them it was embarrassing, the position he'd been placed in for the surgery. He seemed to be recovering, but my mother had expressed a concern; she hadn't liked the way he was  pulling at his bedcovers. For sure, that didn't register with me, even though I was grown up by then. I was there with my father when the call came, a few days later, saying Frank had passed away. My father, hearing the news, dropped to his knees in the living room, between the oil burner and the sofa, and sobbed out loud.