Father's Day...some belated thoughts

I never knew either of my grandfathers. They both died when my parents were children. They are men of myth to me. One, Jim, so I was told, died a hero's death, sacrificing his life for that of a black man in an accident in which the handcar he was on tipped. He shouted for the other man to jump free and was himself crushed, leaving a wife and three small boys. The other, Ed, a talented musician and jeweller, died a drunk and was buried in a potter's field in Key West, leaving a wife and a son and daughter. So my father grew up without the example of what a good father could be, and I grew up with an emotionally distant man who never hugged me and never praised me. My children's father Bob had a poor example of a man to learn from: his father was married four times, and Bob was shuffled between stepmothers, a grandmother and boarding schools, never quite belonging to a family. And then there was John, my second husband, whose father was a cruel and abusive man. ...Small wonder then, that on Father's Day, I feel grief for all the might-have-beens---the father-child relationships that never blossomed and grew.