SANDPOINT – The last time I saw my father alive was on Father’s Day in 2012. The date was June 17, and he was surrounded by children and grandchildren – lucid, entertaining as always and talking about who he would interview next for one of his columns in the Daily Bee.

Two days later, Bob Gunter was on his deathbed, finally passing away in the wee hours of June 20. I wasn’t at his side when he made his crossing, but my sweet sisters were there. My absence was because he encouraged me to head out on tour with my wife for our annual slate of music performances in the Midwest.

As I write this, Tami Belzer-Gunter and I are buttoning up the house and packing our gear to embark upon that same tour. The juxtaposition of Father’s Day and our impending departure brings the events of seven years ago back in high relief.

As we all filed out of his room at a Post Falls care facility, where he had landed after nearly dying at home and our collective hope was for a rebound and a return to his own place, I hung back to ask him a question. Are you sure we shouldn’t cancel the tour dates and stay here? Are you certain you’ll be around when we get back?

There was a sparkle in his eye as he insisted we go play our music, go see new sights, go do the very thing he had dreamed of doing himself as a younger man. He knew he was close to dying – I could sense it. And he knew that I knew. His final dispensation, his last gift, was to once again make music the thing that bound us together.

From the time I was a small boy, Dad and I would sit together for hours listening to music. My three siblings were either too restive or more interested in other aspects of the man to join us, so it became our special ritual. Whether spinning LPs or cueing up reel-to-reel tapes, the donning of headphones – we each had a pair – and starting the music was our magic carpet ride, our secret place.

From Beethoven to Broadway, Bluegrass to Bob Dylan, there were precious few musical genres that escaped his passion. He came by those eclectic tastes honestly, growing up in Alabama and sitting with family and friends playing old-time tunes and singing gospel songs on the porch after a day of practicing the classics on violin.

As a youngster, his German taskmaster of a teacher made him practice arduously as part of his chosen path to become a concert violinist. He dreamed of traveling the world and playing in grand concert halls. When he lied about his age to enlist in the Army at 17 and serve in World War II, those plans were sidelined. After the war, he continued to play his “fiddle” and joined small town symphony orchestras in West Virginia and North Carolina.

Together, we would listen for hours on end to musical fare that might range from the light classics to musical soundtracks, sweeping along the way through mountain music and rock n’ roll.

Eyes closed, he would conduct an invisible orchestra one moment, whistle along to a rousing banjo line in the next, then wrap it all up by singing along to a spiritual in a voice he described as his “graveyard tenor.” Asked how he came up with that description, he said, “Because it sounds like I’m fixin’ to die.”

So it was that, when it came his time to die, he handed the torch to me, his son, to carry his dream forward. Those seeds that were planted as I sat by his side took root and flourished and I became a professional musician.

Like all fathers, he had his dark side and his demons to wrestle. Like all sons, I became privy to some of them, saddled by others and was left with the familial legacy of deciding which dragons to slay, which to ignore and which to make peace with.

Fatherhood, it seems to me, boils down to this: Mere mortals, individuals all, we one day find ourselves with the sacred responsibility of taking a new generation by the hand and leading it forward. When we succeed, we can be an inspiration. When we stumble, we serve as a cautionary tale, an example of which steps to avoid.

Just as my father before me, I have tripped up, lost my way, made egregious mistakes. Then again, I have loved and I have led. I have, haltingly, tried to show the way forward.

For me, on this day, when so many of us are privileged to be with our children and to open those greeting cards that speak of how “great” we are as fathers, there is a hint of that sparkle in my own father’s eye when he knew he was dying. I look at my children – and their children, my grandchildren – in much the same way he looked at me on this same day seven years ago.

I am humbled by their love, in spite of my missteps, and I am encouraged by how much better they are navigating the rocky road of parenting than I managed to. My father is there, as well. We are wearing headphones. We are smiling. He is reaching out his hand to bring me along and, in time, to hand me the torch. The hands of my own children are already open, waiting to grasp it and hold it higher than I could have imagined. Therein lies my hope and redemption.

Happy Father’s Day.