The last day of January marked the 50th anniversary of my father’s death. At age 55, he drew his last breath in a New York City hospital, in the presence of my mother, one of my brothers, one of my sisters, and me. It was an event that some of us never entirely recovered from and that remains deeply imprinted on my psyche.

John Griffin died of bleeding stomach ulcers, a disease then common among journalists, but no longer fatal now as it could be in 1954. Ulcers of this sort had long afflicted my father, a newspaperman who had faced deadlines and other career pressures throughout his adult life.

As first a reporter, then Sunday editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, he worked for a newspaper that had been one of the largest in the United States and the most important in New England. In the years after World War II, however, it began a decline that would lead to its demise in 1956.

When I was a boy, Dad would leave the house after an early supper and go off to work until after midnight. I remember him setting out for the trolley at the bottom of our street in Watertown, headed for Newspaper Row on Washington Street in Boston. As his career progressed, he worked more conventional hours, though he would often cover stories that required him to go away.

One such assignment took him away for several weeks. That came in 1939 when he sailed to Rome with Cardinal O’Connell for the election of a new pope to succeed Pius XI.  The choice of Eugenio Pacelli who took the name Pius XII turned into one of the most fateful in history, given this pope’s still controverted role in the war.  

For my father, the main focus of the ocean voyage was suspense as to whether O’Connell would reach Rome in time to vote. The Boston prelate had missed the two previous elections, arriving too late for inclusion among the cardinals who cast ballots. This time, as the Post’s correspondent duly documented, O’Connell made it to Vatican City just in time.

A year later, father followed the trail of Wendell Wilkie during the latter’s campaign for the president. How my father felt about this Republican candidate I do not know but it must have been evident early on that Wilkie would not dislodge Franklin Roosevelt.

In time, my father became a columnist as well, writing two columns a week in one stretch of ten years. It is perhaps unsurprising that his oldest son finds himself on a similar run some 50 years later. My dad also appeared regularly on a pioneering Boston television program, “Starring the Editors,” an activity that he seems to have enjoyed but that added to a heavy work load.

The death of her husband was an especially heavy blow for my mother. Alice Griffin, like many of the women of her time, was not prepared, either practically or psychologically, to go it alone after losing her spouse. She survived for another three decades herself but never entirely regained her ability to handle effectively her own problems and those of her family.

One of my brothers recently told me that he has never been reconciled to our father’s death. “The wound heals but a scar remains,” he said. I myself was 26 and already living away from home, so the death did not have quite the same impact on me.

However, the unexpected loss of my father registered deeply with me too. More times than I can count, I have replayed in memory the awful scene of his dying. I still regret my inability then to have expressed my love for him: the sight of him struggling to breathe and lying helpless as I had never seen him before overwhelmed the impulse I felt to speak to him.

Now, at age 75, I have lived 20 more years than my father did. How could my mother and my five younger siblings have been deprived of his presence when they so needed him? What brought it about that his best friend, Elliot Norton, lived to 100, almost doubling my father’s span of years? Why have I received the gift of longevity and not my dad?  And why did I never have the opportunity to talk with him about his life and mine as we both grew older together?  

These and other such mysteries will continue to haunt me no matter how many more years I live. However, at the same time I feel grateful to God for having had John Griffin as my father and I treasure the legacy he left me.

From the vantage point of 50 years later, I hold him in increasingly deeper affection and, as time goes on, I place even greater value on the heritage he passed on to me and the other members of my family.

Richard Griffin