The day on which I drafted this column, January 31, 2004, was the 50th anniversary of my father’s death.

To me and my three brothers and two sisters, it remains a day of mixed feelings. We still regret his loss at age 56, a death that seems to us premature. He died of stomach ulcers, then often a disease fatal to newspapermen but now an illness easily handled by modern medical remedies.

Ultimately, John Griffin died of the pressures often felt by people in his career. As reporter, columnist, Sunday editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, he lived with constant deadlines and experienced the rise and fall of a publication that went from great journalistic success to complete business failure. In its last days it was taken over by a ne’er do well who ran it into the ground.

For family members, the loss of our father was devastating. It hit my younger siblings especially hard, as it did our mother. Like many other women of that era, she was not prepared for either the practical or the emotional challenges suddenly brought on by death of her husband. To some degree, she never recovered from this loss, despite living four more decades.

Though I was the first-born and already away from home and progressing in my first career, my father’s death had a strong emotional impact on me. I still remember vividly the scene in the New York City hospital room where he died. It was the first time I had ever seen him helpless, as he lay unconscious and laboring to breathe.

I bent over him and wanted to tell him of my love for him but, never having done so previously, could not do so then. This failure continues to cause me regret, as does the emotional tension that I used to feel in his presence when I was a teenager.

The days of grief that followed – – the wake in our home, the crowds of people who came to express condolences, and the funeral attended by hundreds of prominent Bostonians and friends –  – have also maintained their hold deep within my psyche. To some degree, this death remains one that I have never felt entirely reconciled to, even 50 years later.

I regret not having had the opportunity to talk with him when I was grown up and more mature. Conversation when we both were past the time of conflict would have been precious to me. I sometimes fantasize about the two of us sitting down together and talking about the old days. But that never happened.

My father had 20 fewer years of life than I have had thus far. His family depended on him, especially those who were still young children. It all seemed so unfair. Why could he not have lived to be 100 as did his best friend, Elliot Norton, who died only last year?

And yet, he did have time to pass on to us a legacy of precious human values that have continued to benefit us all. The spirituality that meant much to him means much to us also. Family traditions of love for learning and respect for other people owe their origin to our father as well as our mother.

My father’s faith, passed on to me, supports my basic outlook on reality. I believe that his life has continued in a different sphere of being. Long since, I have made my own the words of our funeral liturgy whereby life is “changed, not taken away.” Those same rites call our destination “a place of refreshment, light, and peace.”

I like to think of my father as with God and enjoying the transformed existence that my spiritual tradition describes. That is what I hope for myself when the time comes for me to leave this world.

I feel thankful to my father for the heritage that he passed on to me and my siblings. He was a person who embodied many traits that I have come to value more in my later years.

The anniversary of his death, untimely event that it was, brings back a full store of memories and prompts me to offer thanks to God for my father.

Richard Griffin