My father and I parted ways 40 years ago, he to an early death at age 39 and I to an early adulthood at age 7. He walked out the door one day and I never saw him again. I looked for him for years, imagining that someday he would walk back in the door, or emerge from among a crowd of other fathers at a graduation or a ballgame, back into my life. He never did.

For years I only missed him and felt his absence, most often at those times when a man should be able to look around for a father’s knowing smile, reach for his reassuring hand, or match stride for stride. He was never there, it seemed, not to see the girl of my dreams, his grandchildren, or my work well done.

Then, long after I stopped looking for him, I started to find him again where I never expected to, in me. In recent years I have found him in my own role as a father, in my work as a doctor and a writer, and on the peaceful greens of the game of golf we both have loved. He had always been there, but I missed his presence by focusing only on his absence.

In the midst of my work as a doctor in the emergency department, or at the keyboard banging out a column, I can now feel him looking over my shoulder because we both spent time treating the injured and dying, and as reporters. He wanted to be a doctor, too, until he served in the Second World War as a combat medic. In three years of duty he must have seen enough blood and death to last his lifetime, because he never went into medicine after his return from the war. He became a newspaper reporter instead, a journalist recording life’s events instead of a physician trying to conduct them.

Through our work he and I have both known the power of the healing hand and the printed word. We have both seen others die despite our best efforts, and on bad days he too probably wondered why God seemed to be missing in action. We have both believed in the importance of a free press, and loved the ability of the printed word to be shaped into a symphony of thoughts.

Though I cannot remember what it felt like to have my hand held in his, on the golf course I can feel my hands against his. The putter I now use is leather-handled and old, and it was his putter when he played golf. I like the sight of it in my golf bag, and that it is old-fashioned, and that it was his. He must have liked its light touch, its smooth grip, and the way it clicked the ball on its way across a green glistening with morning dew. So do I. I like the fact that I putt better with my dad’s putter than with any other putter I have ever used, even if I just think so. Best of all, with his putter in my hands, if I listen closely I can almost hear him sigh with satisfaction when my long putt curls home, or curse the game when my ball spins around the lip of the cup, and out. With his putter in my hands I can share with him what he felt at such moments.

Oddly enough it was in a father’s fear for the safety of his children in an uncertain world that first made me understand him as father. In the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, he and my mother had a bomb shelter built underground in our back yard. For years I have thought he was crazy to think that a shelter a few feet underground would save us from the Russian nukes aimed at the Air Force base a few miles away.

Then I had children. Then terrorists flew hijacked planes into buildings, my older daughter went to college in Washington, D.C., and my younger daughter started talking about college in Europe or New York. Then I understood my father because I understood the fear in his heart for his children, for me. I knew that bomb shelter was built out of his desperation, a desperation I can now physically feel as my own. I understand because, if it would keep my children safe, I would be out right now in the front yard with a shovel looking to the heavens and asking, “OK, Dad, about how far down should I be digging the hole for our bomb shelter?”

Fear, however, has not been his greatest legacy to my parenting. I have been guided as a father in part by what I thought would have made him proud of me, and by what he would have expected of me had he been there in person. I see in my children his love of the written word, his sharp wit, and his passion for what is right. He is clearly a grandfather of my children even though they have never met him.

Sooner or later, to one degree or another, we all part ways with our fathers. If we are lucky we find them in ourselves, and their meaning in our lives, before we part ways. If we are really lucky, we find the best of our fathers in the best of what we become. As I grow up and older I am more proud every Father’s Day to be my father’s son. I am part of his echo on this earth, and as long as that is true, he is not lost to me. What more could a child ask for on Father’s Day?

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.