What I wouldn’t give to bring you down to breakfast in assisted living again. All the tables were set for a formal breakfast gathering, complete with a fresh flower in a vase. You would always order pancakes. Blueberry pancakes with bacon. Your favorite. Along with orange juice, coffee and dessert. We always enjoyed these holiday meals.

Then we would go back to your room to watch TV together and open your presents. You especially loved scratch-off lottery tickets. It didn’t matter what the prize was, even if it was just a free ticket. You won something and that’s what mattered to you. It would bring a huge smile to your face. I can still see it now.

Then we would go out for your favorite Father’s Day steak dinner. Always to Red Lobster. They actually had the best steak around. We would take our time and just enjoy being out together. You would even have a beer.

We would return to your room to watch more TV and have dessert that I brought in. A blueberry pie from one of the local farms.

We would sit together and talk about current events while also reminiscing about your past, until the aide came in to help you get ready for bed. It was still early, so you’d sit in your chair for a little while longer until the end of your TV program. You would then tell me you were tired and ready to go to bed.

I’d help you out of your chair and walk you over to your bed. You took your slippers off. You would lay down so I could tuck you in. You loved, loved, loved it when I would tuck you in. Then we would do our good nights together at the same time. We would say: “good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite”.

As you closed your eyes, I would tell you that I’d see you tomorrow. Then I’d turn around and walk away, quietly closing the door behind me.

If only…just one more time.

Then there is the other world of memories. World #2.

The world where, unfathomly in 2019, four years ago would end up unknowingly be our last Father’s Day together.

We were so close to having that NOT happen. So close to having just one more Father’s Day together. Even if it was only on Zoom. That’s ok, I’d take it.

But that was not to be. You passed away just 14 days before Father’s Day 2020. We hadn’t even had your non-funeral, burial yet. Didn’t seem real then, still doesn’t seem real now. F*** Covid!

I literally just now realized something. Not only was this our last Father’s Day together in 2019. This was also our first Father’s Day together without Mom. How unfair! Still cannot believe it. It’s just too much to comprehend. Again, F*** Covid!

If only I had known this would have been the last. If only there was some sign. The thought of this day brings immeasurable sadness. What I wouldn’t give – if only, I could go back. PLEASE. If only…just one more time.

I’m torn. In two worlds simultaneously.

World #1 – Heartwarming past memories pop up. Happier days gone by.

In the morning, we would all walk to the Borough Hall for the town’s Father’s Day breakfast. A fundraiser. You always supported and looked forward to this annual event. We all did.

You loved their homemade breakfast so much. It was really good. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, home fries, cake/Danish, orange juice and coffee. It was always blueberry pancakes, bacon, orange juice and coffee for you.

But I think it was also the atmosphere that made this so special. The majority of the town would attend. The always warm welcome…at the door and from all those who were cooking and serving. Everybody happy and smiling.

Being together with family, friends and neighbors. Everybody stopping to talk to everyone. A very warm, close, beloved, small community. A place to be cherished. A place where everybody knows your name.

God, how I miss those days. What I wouldn’t do for another one. If only…just one more time.

My father, Dr. John Thomas Makley, was a deep-thinking clown. An oncologist and orthopaedic surgeon, he faced some of the most harrowing medical crises his patients could encounter, yet he was, almost to the very end, the life of the party. Youngest of five kids in a strict German-Irish Catholic family in Dayton Ohio, apple of his older mother’s eye, hometown boy made good in the big city of Cleveland, he loved to regale guests with long, often bawdy jokes. He told his jokes with such relish he would act them out garishly, sometimes losing the thread and having to start over, but never showing a sign of dismay for love of the laughter.

When my siblings and I cleaned out the home he shared with my mother Kitty, his high school sweetheart and wife of over sixty years, I archived their letters, journals, notes and photos online. John and Kitty courted all through their college years, he three years older and wiser. In their early letters to each other while in college, hundreds passing between them before they married, they addressed each other as “clown,” and competed for which of them would out-joke the other. She couldn’t get him to confirm the time and place he would pick her up from the airport, and sent a handwritten mock telegram informing him that, “Miss Kitty will be arriving December 18th at 8:41 pm on TWA flight number 65. Please take careful note and make your plans in accordance”. He replied with an actual Western Union telegram, “Information Complete. See you 9:41 on flight 56. Are you parachuting? John”. In his letters to Kitty, he described the pranks he and his buddies would play on the priest-teachers at their Catholic university, as well as his final project in his Philosophy of Ethics class, in which he took to the top of Brother Murray’s desk to demonstrate the Charleston dance for the class.

But he also told Kitty of his serious commitment to medical school, his deep Catholic faith, and his undying love for her, all of which he never forsook. When John retired from his thirty-year career as a surgeon, he meticulously planned his retirement activities in his woodworking diary, from his ideas for the garden and beekeeping, to his ideal woodshop remodel. And in his farewell speech at the hospital, he of course adopted the voice of the philosopher clown, the performer who both makes you laugh and makes you think, the buffoon willing to wear his heart on his sleeve, “Holy shit! I’m a 61-year-old orthopaedic surgeon looking at retirement! Now what do I have to look forward to?” And he laid out a plan to immerse himself in theological and philosophical research into the human condition, a goal he pursued rigorously for years until his Alzheimer’s made it impossible.

I can still picture him sitting in the embroidered wingback chair in his study, listening to stirring music on his headphones, immersed in a Carl Jung book. His clown-philosopher voice from his retirement speech reverberates across that memory: “I have come to the need to explore in depth those avenues of the intellect that make the time and effort spent in education and practice in the profession meaningful and worthwhile, to help explain the tremendous human suffering and sorrow that is inflicted on the human race. The question of ‘Why?” plagues my thoughts constantly. I must therefore begin again to explore the depths of human experience as reported by the many great minds of the past and present who have given much time and energy to these same questions.”

Yet the clown resurfaced at the end of his speech as he concluded, “My goal is to embark upon the quest with that precious time I have left to pursue the Holy Grail–LET THE WINDMILLS SPIN!”

My father John never lost that sense of humor, even as we said goodbye to him through the screen of his nurse’s phone in that locked down Covid ward. On this father’s day of 2023, three years after you left us, we miss you, Dr. John, and we will keep your windmills spinning.

Third Fathers Day without him! Third Father’s Day where he should be grilling, cracking jokes, golfing, drumming, and spending time with his family.
Until we meet again — We love and miss you!