WHEN IT’S SPRINGTIME IN THE ROCKIES

My father was dying.

There he lay on the living room sofa, a quilt my great-grandmother had sewn drawn up to his unshaven chin. He was in a deep, troubled sleep brought on by the stroke. The doctor had said he could go at any moment. As I stood over him that late afternoon, I had to admit—after all these years, we remained, in essence, total strangers.

Papa’s dry goods store in town had been a seven-days-a-week operation, leaving him little time for me. I hardly remember seeing him around our modest house. It’s not that I ever doubted his love; he just wasn’t present.

Early on, I found escape in music. It became my life, my reason for being. Aside from the Steinway concert grand piano my mother inherited from her family, we had no luxuries to speak of. But that piano was everything to me. After finishing homework and chores, I would rush to the keyboard and lose myself for hours. By age eight, I was giving recitals. I don’t remember my father attending a single one.

At seventeen, my piano teacher recommended I apply to Berklee College of Music, but the idea was quickly dismissed—there was no way we could afford it. So I enrolled at Boston State, majoring in sociology. Helping people seemed a decent way to make a living.

It was there I met Clint Edwards, a handsome budding academic. Our love blossomed. After I graduated, we married. Papa came to the ceremony at St. Peter’s Episcopal but excused himself from attending the reception.

Clint went on to earn a law degree at Northeastern and joined the regional ACLU staff. We settled in a two-family house on Procter Street in Salem, living on the second floor. By mutual agreement, we never had children. In our living room stands a console piano, a used Yamaha we bought years ago. Playing remains my passion. These days, my only public performances are with the church music group.

When the doctor told us Papa was in his final days—my mother had passed two years earlier—we decided to bring him into our home instead of placing him in hospice. We thought this was where he would want to spend his last moments.

As I looked down at his frail, desiccated body, his eyes closed, I realized how little we had ever known each other. Yet there was something between us—intangible, ethereal. Not just a genetic bond. Yes, I had his piercing blue eyes and his assertive chin, but there was something more—some shared essence.

His breathing had become shallow. I searched my heart for something I could do, some way to say goodbye. Then it came to me: music. I would play him a song.

The first that came to mind was Clair de Lune, a piece that never failed to stir emotion. But then I remembered another tune—one Papa had loved. When It’s Springtime in the Rockies. Whenever he was home, he played the Gene Autry version again and again on his old RCA record player. It was on The Singing Cowboy, Chapter Two.

I took a deep breath, walked to the piano, and sat down. I didn’t need sheet music. I had the melody etched in my memory. As the first chords rang out, I felt a closeness I’d never experienced before. A communion of spirits. It was as if Papa and I were meeting—truly meeting—for the first time. And all because of this sentimental Western tune:

When it’s springtime in the Rockies
I’m coming back to you
Little sweetheart of the mountains
With your bonnie eyes of blue

Once again I’ll say I love you
While the birds sing all the day
When it’s springtime in the Rockies
In the Rockies far away

As I played the final note, tears were streaming down my face. Somehow, I felt my father had come back to me—and I to him.

The next morning, he took his final breath.

Alongside the grief came something unexpected: a deep and steady calm. A sense of wholeness, of being restored. Although, to my knowledge, Papa had never left Massachusetts, I like to think of him now somewhere in the Rockies far away—and closer to my heart than ever before.