We bid a final goodbye to my father Richard Dirga this week, at a memorial service underneath the tall pines he loved so much in the California foothills. Thank you so much to everyone who came, friends and family and people I hadn’t seen in years. We had to break out the extra chairs in the end, but Dad was worth it. And thanks to all those who have reached out via message, email, letters and more these last few weeks. Every kindness is appreciated.
Myself, my brother and two beloved family friends all spoke to honour Dad’s remarkable life.
Here is what I said:
Dad didn’t want a funeral, or a big fuss made of him, but we decided we couldn’t let him go without doing something.
We received so many messages, emails and calls after Dad died, and the words that kept coming up again and again were about his kindness, his fundamental good heart and eagerness to help whenever asked. He was part of a vanishing breed – the humble but confident man. He never bragged, never boasted, but everyone who knew him knew that he could command attention when it was called for. He was a born leader who chose to be a helper rather than a commander.
Dad had an extraordinary career with the Air Force that began long before my brother and I were even born. He signed up when he was only 17 years old – when I was 17, I could barely drive a car. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in an almost 20-year career, and he probably could have risen even higher, but he said he never liked the ‘playing politics’ that came with the highest ranks.
Some of the things he did are still classified and the stories he told us are pretty amazing – up to 24-hour missions flying over the North Pole, over Soviet space and over Cuba during the missile crisis, his 6-foot frame crammed into a tiny space the whole time. He would fly with nuclear weapons on board at the height of the Cold War, ready for any sudden escalation. He worked with the B-58, the SR-71 and others during his career, all these clandestine spy missions. It took me years to realise that when we used to watch James Bond movies on the TV as a kid, he wasn’t just watching a fun adventure – he was critiquing it against his own life! (I always thought he looked just a LITTLE bit like Roger Moore, too)
We weren’t even born when he did some of these things, but he carried that calm authority with him his whole life – how many fathers do you know who had the responsibility of flying with active nuclear bombs? It’s not for the nervous.
Mom and Dad always encouraged us to have adventures, to see the world and not be people who spend their whole lives in one small town. When I was nearly 8 years old, they packed up the house and took us to Europe for an entire year, traveling around in an increasingly rickety and mildewy tiny motorhome. It’s fair to say that year changed my life. When I moved to New Zealand with my family nearly 20 years ago, they could have objected. I mean, we were taking their only grandson to the other side of the world, after all. But Dad, who spent a lifetime saying yes to people, never said a word against it. It was a great adventure, and he loved those.
My son Peter is 20 years old now and in his third year studying history and art history at university back in New Zealand. He wouldn’t be there without Dad. When Peter was just four or five years old, Dad took him out to fly remote controlled planes, and that was it – Peter went on to become a military history buff, to build dozens of intricate planes and military models himself, to constantly be excited by the past. Dad’s military career fascinated Peter, and the two of them had a great and wonderful bond. Every time we visited for years, from barely kindergarten age until the beginning of college, Peter and Dad would spend some time flying planes out at Beale. Dad helped set the path of my son’s future.
In the last few years, despite the obstacles life threw at him, despite some of the suffering he had to endure, Dad somehow just kept becoming a better person all the time. It’s as if in his final years, he was distilled down to his purest essence – a kind and curious man whose first thoughts were often about others. At his heart he wasn’t judgmental, and I think he believed that our ultimate goal is just to be decent.
There was a moment when we visited in February that I took a mental photograph of, that I can’t quite forget, and all it was was a simple look Dad gave Mom, as they were sitting together on the couch. It was a look filled with such pure love and admiration, a look that maybe you only get to see when you are married more than 50 years, through thick and thin, the good and the bad. We should all be so lucky to have someone give us a look like that once in our lives.
The last lesson he had to show us was how to go – not with anger and rage at the unfairness of things, but with gratitude. He said again and again these last months how glad he was for an extraordinary life, how lucky he was. The very last conversation I had with him was just a day or two before his final illness, and one of the last things he said was how incredibly proud he was of my brother and I and our families and children.
He fought, hard, and for days after I think whatever made him him left, his body kept on, that mighty heart pumping away. He would never boast, never swagger into a room, but he showed us how strong he really was until the very end. If things had gone differently, I like to think he could’ve made it to 100. He was like a redwood or a towering oak tree in the grand forest of our lives – steady, reliable and protective of us all until his final days. Those who knew Dad know he was a planner, and so it’s probably no surprise that he left a very, VERY detailed to-do list after his passing, to provide for Mom and to make things easier for Chas and I. He’d probably have planned this event too, if he could.
I am sad, still, deep down, and I guess part of me will be that way for a long time. And that’s OK. But right now, right here, I just keep thinking of his smile, the smell of his aftershave, the scratchy stubble I felt on his cheek when he picked us up as kids, the enormous “Dirga dimple’ on his chin that always fascinated me. He always felt like the biggest man in the room to me, even when I grew up to be just a LITTLE taller than him; the way he always felt like he was lifting us up rather than pushing us down. I wouldn’t have been a writer without him; Chas would not have become a nurse. And I am grateful to have had him, for as long as we did, even if it would never quite have felt like enough. How lucky we were.
He loved flying, and the wide open blue skies of California. In an email to a military historian several years back, he wrote that “One benefit I found in flying aircraft was I always felt closer to God. I can’t tell you how many times I felt like I was ‘touching the face of God’ while flying missions over or around Vietnam, Korea or Russia.”
He always liked this poem, High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr, and while Dad didn’t want a funeral, I know that he wouldn’t mind one bit for me to read it here today:
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
For family, friends and those who are interested, the entire memorial service can be viewed here on YouTube as well:
Nik Dirga 
One thought on “Sunward I’ve climbed: Goodbye, Dad.”