{"id":5881,"date":"2023-07-15T22:06:16","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T12:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/?p=5881"},"modified":"2026-09-04T12:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T02:54:14","slug":"there-would-be-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/2023\/07\/there-would-be-time\/","title":{"rendered":"There Would Be Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of my earliest fears
was losing my father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was a child
who knew there was a war somewhere
and understood only this \u2013
that fathers could be taken away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years later,
on his eightieth birthday,
I looked at him
thin and fragile
and still I told myself
there would be time.
Time to go to Mass with him again,
to drive him there,
to sit beside him in the familiar quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came the hospital.
And still I thought
there would be time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time for him to recover.
Time for him to come home.
Time for ordinary days
to become ordinary again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after the words
terminal cancer,
some part of me
kept bargaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely not yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so there were days
I did not visit,
because I believed
we still had days to spare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came
the final room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His hand beneath mine.
His eyes half-open.
The strange helplessness
of loving someone
and not knowing what they need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All those years
I had spent around dying people,
and still
when it was my father in the bed,
I became a child again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps love
makes us beginners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it leaves us
hoping
right until the end
that someone will tell us
there is still
more time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later,
the phone rang.
And suddenly
there wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even now, I return
to those last days \u2013
wishing I had known,
stayed longer,
noticed more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But memory brings me
his hand beneath mine,
and the moments
when he quietened
because I was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought
there would be more time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there was
that hand,
that quiet,
that last small way
of being his daughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"the<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This poem is about losing my dad, and the regret that comes with looking back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5881"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6567,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5881\/revisions\/6567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}