by Kile Smith (April 2026)
My father died last year but so far he hasn’t visited. My sister Carole appeared to me once after she died 11 years ago. She comforted me with a long, peaceful look. Brother Gary has been more active, stopping by four or five times since he left us ten years ago.
Mostly, he gives me advice. Except for that last time. A few months ago when he showed up, he just stood there, didn’t say anything, and let me hug him. That’s never happened before, not in dreams and certainly not in this life. I held him tight and buried my face in his chest. His leather jacket (I don’t remember his ever having had a leather jacket) was warm and soft on my cheek. I think I surprised him. He didn’t exactly hug me, but he did put one arm around me.
My brain is working things out in my sleep, I know. I infer no theories or doctrines from these visits. But I have noticed that Dad hasn’t come by yet.
Leighton Smith was 95 when he died. He had been living at the Veterans Administration home in Northeast Philadelphia for what turned out to be his final ten months. When hospice care became necessary and the end was near, the VA phoned me to come and collect his wedding ring, which they had just liberated from his finger.
That ring was not from my mother; no, this wedding ring was put on his finger by another woman—the other woman, the woman whom he had left my mother for, some 55 years ago, the woman he had broken his family for, the woman now living with him at the VA home.
When I identified myself to the nurse at the station, she handed me the ring and told me that Mrs. Smith had just been transferred to a hospital because of heart issues. Mrs. Smith. Fifty-five years and I’m still not used to that. My mom, who had been Mrs. Smith, is 96 and lives in South Carolina. Well, Leighton’s wife—the current Mrs. Smith—passed her hospital tests fine, the nurse said, and would be back at the VA in a few hours.
The nurse thought that she had not seen me before. Did I live far away?
“Twenty minutes,” I said.
She was not reproachful, yet I felt the need to explain. I did visit, I said, but no, not a lot. Dad walked out on our family, on my mom, on all four kids, and ran away with the lady he’s married to now. I was 13 when this multi-vehicle pileup began, and when it was all over, what I knew of as my family had been destroyed. The other woman’s family, destroyed.
The consequences—my mom’s weeping, her exhaustion from work, the suffocating cloud of silence, the stiff-upper-lip non-communication of us siblings, the loss of contact with Smith-side cousins—were uncountable. I know, because I have tried to count them, and there are always more.
Much of the pain, I’m aware, comes from my lifelong tendency toward introspection. What we used to call broken families are everywhere, but nowadays everyone—in Hollywood entertainments and in real life—seems to get along just fine after divorce. That’s what they say, anyway.
Not me, though. At 13 I was bushwhacked, flattened by the rubble of a happy house falling down on my head. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so naive, but family, it turned out, had been my foundation. Its crackup left me shattered.
The biggest comeuppance was realizing that my life had been a lie. To my dad, that lady mattered, not my Mom, not my family, not me. This is how I drew it up: to one of the most important people in my life, I did not matter.
The nurse, behind the curved bulwark of her counter, listened patiently as I presented my defense, my confession. Then she asked me, calmly, “Have you forgiven him?”
I admired her gumption.
“Yes,” I said. “A long time ago.” It had taken a while. First, I confronted the faith I had been raised in, which I had slipped away from. I didn’t see it then as a logical arc but I see it now. I started to act on my beliefs. Dad had kicked my family out from under my feet, and after some spinning I landed on faith. It held. At 16, on my own, for the first time, I began reading the Bible.
That year I also, crazily, and with no more preparation than untutored experience as an amateur choir singer, decided to become a composer. By 19, I was in Bible college and scratching out the scrawny beginning pages of a composing career.
What I didn’t know was that in a few years my dad and his new wife would also “get religion.” He studied and became a lay preacher and a chaplain at retirement homes and religious retreats. Wasn’t that a surprise, but no more odd, after all, than me, an East Coast mainline Lutheran, going to Bible college.
By fits and starts he reconnected with me. He’d call. At first I was merely civil. But I knew, and hated that I knew, that I would eventually forgive him. It took turning 40, though, for me to grow up enough to discard his choices, which I had made my burden. He never asked for forgiveness, but it didn’t matter. I forgave him anyway. We talked on birthdays, and I even started, after some years, to call him on Fathers Day. That was huge, I told the nurse.
“You did the right thing,” she said. When people don’t forgive, “they only hurt themselves.”
In a state of what felt like absolution I walked the polished hall to his room. With his wife not there, it would be just the two of us, Dad and me alone, for the first time in six decades.
He was asleep, his torso elevated by the top half of his hospital bed. The side rails were up. His hospital gown was cockeyed around his neck, his right shoulder, exposed. It was smooth, like a boy’s, but the skin was cellophane-thin.
I spoke softly, “Dad? It’s Kile.” He slowly opened his eyes, turned his head, and looked blankly at me. Then he began to speak unintelligibly, as if he were trying to tell me something important. But what came out weren’t words. They were more like groans or murmurs.
He had already been losing his memory. Twice during visits his wife had to remind him who I was. Once, he thought I was my brother Gary. Once I was his brother, Steve, also long gone. Funny, I got my middle name Stephen from him.
I talked about my wife Jackie, our daughters, and our one grandchild, his great-grandson, not knowing if he understood any of it. He kept fidgeting and murmuring, at times groaning over my talking. My visit didn’t seem helpful. So before leaving I opened my phone to look up a passage of Scripture.
I typed in “john 1.” John is a beautiful Gospel and I thought we could use something beautiful. But as soon as I typed “1,” it filled in “14.” So I hit that and smiled: my phone had suggested the most frequently read passage at Christian funerals. So I read this to Dad:
Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
I stopped and looked at him. For the first time he was utterly still and silent, and even more riveting, he was looking right at me. So piercing was his gaze, I realized I couldn’t remember any time in my life that Dad had ever really looked at me. He was breathing calmly. His eyes looked deep into me, so deep it was as if he was looking through me, looking to something else. Whether I was Gary or Steve or Kile or Jesus to him, I didn’t know.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
I stopped. I bent over him, put my hand on his bare shoulder and prayed, and when I finished I opened my eyes, and his eyes were closed, and he was breathing softly. I bent lower and kissed his forehead.
At the station I asked the nurse how long she thought it’d be now. She began to demur but I pressed her. I didn’t mind, she could be frank with me.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
The next afternoon we got the call.
It’s been over a year and as I said, Dad hasn’t shown up. I know I’m only looking to be comforted, so maybe, even with my forgiving him, I haven’t grown up all that much.
But today Jackie was babysitting Jack, our second grandson. He’s three months old. She texted me a video of him, propped up, sitting in his stroller, all smiles. She’s saying his name and asking him questions and it sounds as if he’s really answering her, not in words but in happy groans, in murmurs, in those sounds babies make, the sounds of the power of life and the comfort of dreams, and don’t you know, he’s looking right at the phone, he’s looking right at me, looking right through me.
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Kile Smith is a multi–Grammy-nominated composer whose choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music is hailed internationally for its strong voice, sheer beauty, and “profoundly direct emotional appeal.” He is commissioned, performed, and recorded by leading choirs in the U.S. and Europe. Kile was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, the largest orchestral lending library in the world, host of Fleisher Discoveries on radio and podcast from 2002 to 2024, and a classical music radio announcer. His essays, mostly on classical and pop music and composing, have been published in the Philadelphia arts and culture magazine Broad Street Review. His website is here.
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3 Responses
Compliments to the author for this superb really insightful honest devastating yet hopeful and heartfelt and very affecting thing.
I admit to being teary-eyed when I finished reading this.
The author should know (and surely does) that many never comprehend the value of self-denial and its critical importance not only to themselves.
D.S. Freeman in his masterpiece 4-volume biography of Robert E. Lee wrote:
Of humility and submission was born a spirit of self-denial that prepared him for the hardships of the war and, still more, for the dark destitution that followed it. This self-denial was, in some sense, the spiritual counterpart of the social self-control his mother had inculcated in his boyhood days, and it grew in power throughout his life. He loved the luxury that wealth commanded. Had he been as rich as his Grandfather Carter, he would have lived in a style as hospitable. Fine horses and handsome clothes and lavish entertainments would have been his; Arlington would have been adorned, and his daughters would have enjoyed travel and the richest comfort. But Arlington was confiscated, its treasures were scattered, each stage of his sacrifice for the South brought him lower and lower in fortune until he was living in a borrowed tenant house and his wife was husbanding the scraps from a pair of trousers a farmer’s wife had made for him. His own misfortunes typified the fate of the Confederacy and of its adherents. Through it all, his spirit of self-denial met every demand upon it, and even after he went to Washington College and had an income on which he could live easily, he continued to deny himself as an example to his people. Had his life been epitomized in one sentence of the Book he read so often, it would have been in the words, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” And if one, only one, of all the myriad incidents of his stirring life had to be selected to typify its message, as a man, to the young Americans who stood in hushed awe that rainy October morning as their parents wept at the passing of the Southern Arthur, who would hesitate in selecting that incident? It occurred in Northern Virginia, probably on his last visit there. A young mother brought her baby to him to be blessed. He took the infant in his arms and looked at it and then at her and slowly said, “Teach him he must deny himself.”
A very tender reflection.
Dear Kile,
I read your story around 1:30 am July 6. I really enjoyed it. I like your style a lot. It’s very human, very modern, very strong, very deep, very readable, very magnetic, enticing, special… I am looking forward to reading more of your work and also to listening to your music.