She agreed, but added that for her, there was also a feeling that her father had always been there and would always be.  Not a logical feeling, but a true one.  When my grandmother died, two years after my grandfather, I remember my dad saying, “Now I’m an orphan.”  He was 59.

All my siblings, as well as my mother, live in metro Detroit.  All of us went to Nova Scotia last month. The main purpose: to have a memorial mass for those who couldn’t come to Michigan for his funeral, to celebrate Dad’s life, and to bury his ashes in his beloved Cape Breton.

I find I don’t have a lot of patience with people who talk about reaching closure as if it’s a stop on the subway.  I suppose they mean well, but I can’t help hearing an implied timetable, a hint that you should define some point and then get off the emotional train.

No, when I say “closure,” I mean a kind of rethinking.  It’s figuring out how to continue your relationship with the person who’s died – and fitting that with your other relationships.

I’m managing.  I couldn’t say when, but one day, a few months after Dad died, I had been feeling sad about his absence from some event taking place.  I stopped and asked myself what was going on. The feeling cleared itself up:  ”He would have hated to miss this.”

And then he was there: I could picture him sitting the way he did in his last few years. Often quiet because of his growing deafness and fading vision; bubbling and beaming when someone sat close enough to engage with him.

I don’t idealize him.  He wasn’t the best dad in the history of the world; he was simply the best one I had.  The memorial service down home helped me see him through the eyes of old family friends, of cousins and second cousins and their children.  Unlike other family names in that small place — the local paper once had five editors, all named Macdonald — for a long time there was only one family in town named Ferguson.

And the people who gathered at Stella Maris church on a warm Saturday in July are working on the latest chapter in their relationship with the one Hughie Ferguson they’d known all their lives.

The primary reason was my dad’s eyesight–he couldn’t drive safely at night to visit friends and play cards.  The computer allowed us to install card-game software.  The software created virtual partners for cribbage, pinochle, and euchre, as well as solitaire cards that never got sticky.

A few weeks later, my mother asked if they could get to the internet.  We got her an AOL account and bought two copies of a graphic-rich how-to book.  (That way, when she had a question, I’d use my copy and say, “Look on page 32.  I’ll walk you through the steps…”)

I printed the first email she sent, in May of 2000.  It read, in part:

I want to know what URL means.  I want to know if my address book has the e-mail addresses in it.  And how do I get it?

Those are great, goal-oriented questions.  And I had forgotten this from my dad, about a month later, until I found the copy this morning:

Hi David

Mom made me do it

This is the old fellow trying to compose a little note.

How am I doing?

Love Dad

For quite a while, they had fun with email (mostly receiving, since their typing skills weren’t the greatest). Over time, though, Mom and Dad had difficulties with the mechanics: they’d get attachments they couldn’t open, and their in-basket will fill up because they didn’t quite get the hang of filing.

Then I had an epiphany: I set up what I called the world’s smallest blog (audience: two).  Instead of writing letters or email, I started posting to the blog.  Instead of searching their in-basket, they’d click on the desktop shortcut I created.

With photos embedded in the posts, they didn’t have to open attachments.  The blog would automatically archive by month, and also by broad topic.  And my three children (who between them have more than half a dozen blogs) had author access, so they too could plop down at this digital kitchen table for a visit.

I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, Sunday was the blog’s fourth anniversary (official readership is down to just my mother).  Second, and not entirely by chance, Sunday also marked the blog’s one-thousandth post.

That’s right: for four years, my parents have had virtual guests about five posts a week.

By and large the posts on their blog are astonishingly mundane.  I write about a trip into Washington, or making chicken stew provençal, or (much less often) about a consulting project I’m working on.

Oh, and the weather.  My dad always wanted to know what our weather was like.

My kids tease me, but they know the real purpose: each post is a brief chat with my mother, often with pictures (she got a lot of pictures of last February’s snowpocalypse), letting her know what’s going on here.  They add their own comments, and a fair number of pictures of the great-grandchildren.

Another reason I mention this is that when I came up with the idea, I realized I’d broken through my own preconception of what a blog was.  Blogs are for the world at large?  Not necessarily.  They have your Big Thought of the Day?  Ehh, maybe not.  They’re all about ever-expanding readership?  It’s debatable.

What really happened is that I had a problem to solve–Mom and Dad’s challenges in working with email, and my own spotty record in sitting down to write them some email.  And by ignoring what I thought were conventions of the medium, I found a solution.

The only drawback?  My brother, who lives with my mother, urges me to post at least four times a week.  If I miss two days running, he says, my mother worries that there’s something wrong, either with her computer or with me.

I’m not sure which worries her more.

Screenshot from WordPress is mine; CC-licensed tea photo by adactio / Jeremy Keith.

When I was a little girl I wished I was a boy.
I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys
Everybody said I only did it to annoy,
But I was gonna be an engineer.

My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An’ lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight (sifted)
May hae some pyles o’ caff in; (bits of chaff)
So ne’er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o’ daffin. (folly)
— Solomon: Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’,
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours’ fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,  (nicely running mill)
Supplied wi’ store o’ water;
The heaped happer’s ebbing still, (even though the hopper is ebbing)
An’ still the clap plays clatter.  (it’s making lots of noise)

Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce Wisdom’s door  (sober Wisdom’s)
For glaikit Folly’s portals:  (thoughtless)
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences-
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,  (stupid tricks)
Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi’ theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;  (contrast)
But cast a moment’s fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;  (what accounts for the difference)
Discount what scant occasion gave,  (take away your luck)
That purity ye pride in;
And (what’s aft mair than a’ the lave),  (often more than all the risk)
Your better art o’ hidin.  (your greater skill at concealment)

Think, when your castigated pulse  (If even your often-punished pulse)
Gies now and then a wallop!  (still jumps at times)
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi’ wind and tide fair i’ your tail,  (with the wind and current in your favor)
Right on ye scud your sea-way;  (you glide over the waves)
But in the teeth o’ baith to sail,  (sailing against both)
It maks a unco lee-way.  (makes for an uncommonly offcourse voyage)

See Social Life and Glee sit down,  (sit down, as in to drink)
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they’re grown  (they’ve turn into)
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate  (oh, if only they’d wait and figure)
Th’ eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,  (what you fear worse)
Damnation of expenses!  (the cost)

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o’ cases;
A dear-lov’d lad, convenience snug,
A treach’rous inclination-
But let me whisper i’ your lug,  (in your ear)
Ye’re aiblins nae temptation.  (maybe you’re no temptation)

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho’ they may gang a kennin wrang,  (a little wrong)
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.

(Gaelic fear, man, sounds a bit like the English word fair. In the chorus, because the singer is addressing the boatman, the case changes and the word sounds more like English ear.)

Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile
Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile
Fhir a’bhàta, na ho ro eile
Mo shoraigh slàn leat ‘s gach àit’an téid thu

Boatman, o ho ro eile
Boatman, o ho ro eile
Boatman, o ho ro eile
A fond farewell wherever you go

Is tric mi ‘sealltainn o’n chnoc a’s àirde
Dh’fheuch am faic mi fear a’bhàta
An tig thu an-diùigh no’n tig thu a-màireach?
‘S mur tig thu idir gur truagh a tà mi

I often look from the highest hill
To try and see the boatman
Will you come today or tomorrow?
If you don’t come at all I will be downhearted

Tha mo chridhe-sa briste, brùite
‘S tric na deòir a’ ruith o m’ shùilean
An tig thu a-nochd no’m bi mo dhùil riut
No’n dùin mi’n dorus le osna thùrsaich?

My heart is broken and bruised
With tears often flowing from my eyes
Will you come tonight or will I expect you
Or will I close the door with a sad sigh?

‘S tric mi ‘faighneachd de luchd nam bàta
Am fac’ iad thu no ‘bheil thu sàbhailt’
Ach ‘s ann a tha gach aon dhiùbh ‘g ràitinn
Gur gòrach mise ma thug mi gràdh dhut

I often ask people on boats
Whether they see you or whether you are safe
Each of them says
That I was foolish to fall in love with you