Father's Day

Today is Father's Day. In a couple of hours, I will be joining my brother and my father for lunch.

I am fortunate, in that respect. I realize how lucky I am to still have my father on this day. He is 78 years old, and I don't know how many more Father's Days I'll be able to share with him.

I say that only because of my awareness of family heredity and typical longevity. He appears to be in good health, my father, but I'm sure that, with a touch of bewilderment in their eyes and voices, the widow and son of Tim Russert said the same thing on Friday after they were informed that the 58-year-old host of "Meet the Press" had collapsed and died.

The appearance of good health is no guarantee.

I have many friends who no longer have their fathers. Some lost their fathers early in life, others lost them long after they had left the proverbial "nest" to marry and have families of their own.

I can sympathize in my own way. I lost my mother in a flash flood in 1995 so Mother's Day is for me what Father's Day has become for some of my friends.

For them, it is an early summer Sunday, nothing more. Unless they have children of their own, there probably will be no observances of the day, no Father's Day gift, no greeting card. If they are married, their spouses may take them out for a meal, but that's probably the most that will happen today.

There isn't much that can be done to lessen whatever pain you feel over not having your father here on this day. That is especially true for those like Russert's son, who will forever live with the knowledge that his father's death came only days before his special day.

(On that point, I can also sympathize. My mother died about a week before Mother's Day.)

The only real wisdom I can offer is this:

If you still have your father, be grateful and spend time with him whenever you can. Today, for sure, but whenever you can in the other 364 days of the year.

And if your father is no longer living, treasure his memory and honor him by remembering and living by the insights he shared with you as you were growing up.

As Colin McNickle does in today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

McNickle lost his father in 2002, yet he observes, "I again think what a shame it is that his brain -- ever working to maximum capacity -- could not have been transplanted into a far younger body.

"For so much was left untaught and there's still so much I have to learn."