Mark Reason has been writing a blog “in search of” his late father John—”for 30 years the rugby correspondent of the Daily and then Sunday Telegraph. John began his tours of New Zealand in the ’60s and wrote two books chronicling the tours—and he came across a book that reminded him of his father.
That book was My Father’s Tears, by John Updike.
“I last saw my father a week before his death. He was sitting quietly in a chair looking out on the back garden in Twickenham. There was snow on the ground. He smiled at me, peaceful and, I now realise, happy to go. He wasn’t going to hang around. My dad’s smile was saying goodbye to me,” Reason writes.
“I am not sure I ever saw my father cry. The other day in the glorious Hamilton second hand bookshop I saw a copy of John Updike’s My Father’s Tears. Of course, I bought it, there seem to be a lot of Johns in this story.
“Updike’s father was seeing him off at the train station on the way to college. ‘It shocked me—threw me off track as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand good-bye, glittered with tears.’
It was the only time Updike saw his father cry. A few, years later, with Updike trying to fly back from Europe in time to be with his seriously ill father, the news arrived that his dad had died. Updike’s wife put her arms around him and told him to cry.
“‘I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of seizing it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.’
“I find it the other way around. I can’t ever remember seeing my father cry, not even when my little brother died. I am sure he must have done, but not in front of the children. In some ways Victoria was still my father’s ruling monarch. And so I cry quite a lot. My father left me plenty of his tears.”