Fathers Day is Sunday June 21st, and Campaign Life Coalition would like to wish a Happy Fathers Day to all the dads across Canada who strive to be the best father they can be. In an age where broken and fatherless families are common, often with devastating consequences to children, society more than ever needs to hold up fatherhood as a respected and valuable role to which all men should aspire. In that spirit, Campaign Life Coalition is pleased to share this son's personal story about his father. It is republished with permission from Ken Hamilton /The Niagara Gazette .

I am the son of a garbageman

I consider my dad to have been neither God nor godlike. He rarely attended church, and when we gathered around the table to eat, the blessing that he recited was the shortest one in the Bible. He simply prayed, “Jesus wept.”

When I was 5 years old, my father lost his job at Vanadium. When I was 7 years old, my mother died. Life hung in the balance and could have gone a lot of ways; none was perfect.

But had it not been for a surprising decision that my father made, I would have been raised in Griffon Manor by my great aunt and my great-grandmother. Instead, I was raised in the city’s North End in our own home; a home that my father had built for my mother.

Like many of the men of his day, dad came up from the fields of Alabama to our northern city for the factory jobs. Other dads came from the Appalachian coal mines or other such places. Most were undereducated men who worked hard, partied hard, played around and yet still loved their wives and children — though they were naught to readily say so. Dad didn’t until his dying days.

Nonetheless, through him, I have come to believe that there is a reason why we call God by the title of Father — what we are and what we become, here on Earth, is largely based upon either the presence or the absence of our fathers and the influences that they have on our lives.

My 29-year-old mom left five children behind, but who says that men don’t want to father their children? When my loving grandmother and aunts came to take his children, to mother us and to raise them for him, he would not let us go. He would find a way to keep and build his family.

To get off welfare, my father took what I thought at the time was the shameful job of a garbageman. Later in life I came to know better. As a result, I neither look down on those who hang off the back of garbage trucks nor those who scour the streets with rickety Sanford and Son pickup trucks or rackety shopping carts, who pick the city clean of the salvageables that are tossed away.

There is something biblical in salvaging things.

It was with discarded soda pop bottles, metals and copper wire that, if we helped him to prepare it for the junkyard, we got half of the redemption value from it. We also earned money by working as fruit pickers on Lombardi’s farm, mowing lawns, shoveling snow and by the door-to-door selling of the fish that we caught on our weekend fishing trips. That was how we helped to buy our own school supplies and clothes. It is how he bought his pickup truck, his first boat, his Cadillac, his second boat and the travel trailer that he took to his summer fishing camp in Peterborough, Ont.

The Bible says that unless a man works he shall not eat. We ate.

Dad has been dead now for 20 years. He died of Alzheimer’s disease. In the few years prior to his disease and death, I always made sure to tell him that I loved him. At first, he would say okay. Later he would say, “Me, too.”

But in his waning years, whenever he could, the now-old fellow that came to the city as an under-educated factory worker from the fields of Alabama, the old retired garbageman, whose favorite prayer was once “Jesus wept,” would echo my words of affection for him and fully say, “I love you, too.”

Though their deaths were more than 30 years apart, we were able to bury my father alongside my mom. “Blessed Assurance” is a gospel song that I love. The inscription on my mother’s gravestone says, Whispers of Love, from that song; and to the left where my father lies, his stone says Echoes of Mercy. I am blessed with reassurance whenever I visit them there.

I miss them both, as I am sure that most of you miss your parents. I am who and what I am as a result of their influences both while they lived and even in the echoes of their deaths.

I am glad to say Happy Fathers Day, dad; thanks for all that you did and didn’t do.

And a happy Fathers Day to all of you dads, as well, from the son of a garbageman.

Originally published at The Niagara Gazette