My father's son...

Mom often used to exclaim - with great exasperation - that I most certainly was my father's son. I always took those words as a compliment; even if she didn't always intend it as such.

I was sitting in Mom's hospital room the morning of Bryan and Tess's wedding the last time I heard her say those words. I'm pretty sure she hadn't intended it to be a compliment that time, but I choked back tears as she spoke those words.

To understand the context of Mom's comment, you must first understand that Diane lovingly starches and presses the shirts that I wear every day. I can't think of anything more comfortable than a crisply starched shirt; one that would stand on its own if leaned against the wall. I used to take my shirts to the cleaners where I specified heavy starch only because they didn't offer extra-heavy. The cost of having my shirts cleaned and pressed gradually crept up to the point that Diane decided that she would do it, instead. So Diane washes, then starches (no spray starch for my shirts) and wrings out my shirts. She presses them and hangs them in the closet for me to choose from each morning.

I had worn one of those shirts to the hospital that morning. Mom reached out and rubbed the fabric between her thumb and fingers; reminded, I'm sure, of the many hours she had spent starching and pressing Dad's shirts. That's when she said, without prompting, "You certainly are your father's son."

My thoughts immediately went back to the memories of a now distant past. You see, Dad never changed out of his "work clothes" when he got home; he hung up his jacket and took off his tie, but he kept on his crisply starched shirt.

I remembered Mom with a shaker cap in the top of a Pepsi bottle filled with water to dampen his shirts as she pressed them.

I remembered sitting in Dad's lap as he taught me to manually calculate square roots in the margin of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

I remembered him holding me as I cried during Gayle Sayers' speech at the end of Brian's Song.

I remembered him sitting on my bed to tell me Tanda had died.

I remembered being snuggled against him as we sat in the emergency room at Cardinal Glennon hospital when I got a concussion.

I remembered the house on Mardel and the days when my biggest worry was a looming test.

I remembered the days at The Lodge.

I remembered being a kid again.

Mostly, though, I remembered the feeling of Dad's shirt against my cheek. I loved the feel of those shirts on my cheek as I snuggled against him in his chair.

I sat beside Mom's hospital bed as she continued to rub the fabric of my shirt; awash in the emotions of my memories and the grief of knowing that I would never hear her speak those words to me again. Perhaps she, too, was also thinking back to those days of starched shirts.

The silence was finally broken as we said, "I love you," to each other.

I suppose it was in that fleeting moment, with Mom's hand still on the sleeve of my shirt, that we really said goodbye.