“Saudade” is such a quintessentially Portuguese word, and few translations can fully capture everything it conveys.
Today, Portugal celebrates St. Joseph’s Day, and traditionally, it is also a day to celebrate fatherhood.
Anyone who has known me for a while knows that fatherhood was a great desire I had when I was in college. Time has passed... And that desire has slowly turned into an acceptance that our dreams don’t always have to come true.
The fact that the years went by, and that I hadn’t met anyone with whom I could envision a life together, building a family, eventually became a reality.
Time already passed is always an excellent starting point. Memories of something we’ve already experienced give us the courage to look ahead and also to want to forge a path.
On Father’s Day, it’s always the day when I miss most the warm embrace of someone who was by my side for so many years of my life. That kind word, spoken by a confidant—someone who lived in a different era, but who, with his wisdom, knew how to look at what I considered a “drama” and put it into perspective and understand it.
I don’t know how he could have had so much patience. Believe me, I wasn’t an “easy” son. Although I wasn’t an only child, in many ways he wouldn’t let me have the last word. If they bought me clothes I didn’t like, it was a real struggle to convince me to wear them... So many times I refused to go to swimming lessons, and only now do I appreciate all those life lessons that this great man passed on to me.
His life was also an example. Not just the words he spoke, but his actions. He wasn’t a particularly “religious” man, but that didn’t stop those around him from seeing him as a man with a ready smile.
He was a kind person. He would have given the shirt off his back to anyone who asked. He never left a friend without a kind word or a shoulder to lean on.
Many of these traits came from someone who had suffered greatly in life. He had seen a lot in the war he was forced to fight in, from which he brought back only a few friends and much sorrow and pain.
He didn’t like to talk about the war, nor about what he had seen there. He spoke only of the people who had supported him in his most difficult moments.
He’s worked since he was 14. He came to the capital very young, from the countryside, and started working as an errand boy at a famous pastry shop in Lisbon. Later, he worked at a photography studio, where he developed his talent for photography… Something he passed on to me. A passion he instilled in me. Unfortunately, I don’t have the dedication or the genius that he had. But I want to take photos more and more.
To capture every moment. Happy ones... gray ones... or even sad ones. They all count.
Just as everything counts in this life. The longing to hold him close doesn’t seem to lessen with time. Quite the opposite. Knowing that the memories are growing fainter and fainter... makes me miss him all the more.
Image by wondermar from Pixabay
Original text written by @xrayman in Portuguese and translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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