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.