My father, Raymond Tachman (z”l), died suddenly and unexpectedly. My father was kind, loving, and giving. He was patient and loyal and he was quite a character. Dad was someone who in word and deed was able to communicate his love and concern for the people in his life. His legacy, in part, is that he was someone who would go to the ends of the Earth; simply for the pleasure of knowing he made that person happy.

Though I did not get a formal chance to say goodbye, our last phone call speaks volumes to who my father was as a person, what he lived for, and to the legacy he leaves behind. Our conversation started with jokes about the Chicago Cubs-it was 2010. My father then told me with excitement about the unique way he had found the perfect present for my mother for Valentine’s Day and he laughed about having been convinced by my nephew, his grandson, to take an inner tube down a ski run, and how they ended up tumbling down most of the hill.

Not everything that week was happy for him, however. A few days before, on Tuesday, he drove out to the cemetery in a midst of a pure Michigan snowstorm to visit my brother’s grave on what would have been my brother’s birthday.

Though the weather was more than most people would have braved, nothing was going to stop my father from doing what he felt was the right thing to do.

He then told me about something that he had hoped would be a surprise for me; a project that didn’t quite work out as he had planned. I actually think this is the sweetest story about my father. My dad knew how much I loved barbecued chicken and he thought it would make me so happy to receive in the mail a chicken cooked by him. (My mom later relayed to me all that he went through to make this happen.) With this in mind, my father searched every grocery store in his town of Grand Rapids to locate the one kosher chicken in the entire city, and he then spent hours outside in the cold barbequing it.

Next, dad packaged the cooked chicken up with blue ice and went to the post office to overnight mail it. Part of my father’s lasting legacy is the extremes to which he would go to, the tenacious creativity he would employ simply for the joy of making those he loved happy. As it turned out, in his rush to send the cooked chicken off to me, he wasn’t able to confirm my address with my mom and he just trusted the address the post office provided. He planned to send it to me at the Temple where I was serving at the time as a rabbi, and he definitely remembered the “Sholom” part of where I worked. But that must have been all he remembered of the name.

As it turned out, that large, frozen, barbecued kosher chicken, packed with blue ice, the chicken that my father had worked so hard to find, cook, and mail, was sent-not to Temple Sholom-but to Rechovot Shalom, which apparently is a Jehovah’s Witness Center somewhere in Illinois. To this day, I smile when I imagine the Jehovah’s Witnesses surprise: We Jews are knocking at their doors, and we too -have an important message of Eternal Salvation: “ Eat kosher chicken! “

At the end of our phone conversation, my father shared with me words that always came easily to him, “I love you and I am proud of you.”

About those we lost, Rabbi Alan Lew writes: “What lives on of the people we have loved and lost? What breaks our hearts when we think of them? What do we miss so much that it aches? Precisely that suchness, that unspeakable, ineffable, intangible quality, which takes up no space at all and which never did. That’s what survives that great crossing with us. That’s what makes it through the passage from life to death.” How right he is.

Happy Father’s Day to all of you who have lost your fathers, and may their memory and legacy always be a blessing.

Rabbi Taron Tachman, a former contributor to Oy!Chicago, serves as rabbi at Beth Tikvah Congregation in Hoffman Estates, and is the proud father of two adorable toddlers. His favorite food is still kosher barbecued chicken.