Mary Novaria

Published at Mary's dad with his mum (right) and sister in the early 1940s in Poughkeepsie, New York. We memorialized my father 20 years ago this St. Patrick’s Day.  “Oh, your father would have loved this,” more than a few people said. But I knew my father, who’d died four days prior from heart disease, likely would have been unmoved by sharing the occasion with Ireland’s patron saint.   The youngest son of immigrants and 40 years sober, he’d have rolled his eyes at the holiday many Americans use as an excuse to drink beer and paint themselves green, just as he did regarding New Year’s Eve, which he often proclaimed “amateur night.”  In the early 1970s, my dad took a brief interest in his McAleer roots, even procuring the family coat of arms to display in our suburban Chicago entry hall. A onetime Latin scholar, he frequently reminded my brothers and me of the family motto: Spectemur Agendo -  Let us be judged by our deeds. That was the sum of his investment in ...

This piece first appeared in the Huffington Post.  This is my fifteenth Father's Day without my dad. He died of heart failure four days before St. Patrick's Day, a couple of months shy of his 79th birthday, and after a year of hospice care. He took his last breath quite peacefully while I sat by his bedside with my mother and Seamus, my parents' big, fluffy, orange and white cat. I was stunned by how clear it was that my father's spirit had left his body. Only his earthly container remained. A shell of him lay still and quiet and cool on the bed ... but he was gone. And so was a family history I'd neglected to plumb.  Some people seem to be supernaturally connected to loved ones who've gone on to the great beyond. Not so for me. Oh, I can imagine what my father might say or think about something, what movies he'd like to see, or what books he'd be reading if he were still here. And I've wondered how much he might know about our earthly lives h...