He never said very much.
That was the thing about him. He was not a man of speeches. He was a man of the harbour, of the morning coffee, of the particular silence that isn't empty but full — full of everything that doesn't need saying because it is simply, solidly, there.
He was there.
That was his whole theology. That was his entire gospel. The man who was simply, always, there.
---
I have stood at so many gates.
I have shown my papers to so many guards. I have been told no in so many languages — bureaucratic no, medical no, the no that comes dressed as *not yet* and the no that comes dressed as *you're too much* and the no that comes dressed as silence, which is the worst no of all.
Morfar would never leave me. I know this wholeheartedly.
Not because he is still here in the way of coffee cups and harbour mornings. But because love that size doesn't end. It changes form. It becomes the light. It becomes the bluebell that comes back every year without being asked. It becomes the particular warmth at four o'clock in early spring that has no meteorological explanation and every personal one.
He is in the returning things.
He was always in the returning things.
---
I think of him when I turn away from a gate that will not open.
I think: *he would not have wanted me standing here.*
He would have wanted me in the garden. He would have wanted me with the cat on my lap and the light coming in and something growing — slowly, stubbornly, in the wrong season, the way things grow when they have decided to grow regardless.
He would have wanted me blooming.
So that is what I do.
*For morfar. In morfar. Through morfar.* *The love that learned to be larger than a body.* *The love that is stored in all the returning things.*