Happy Father's Day:

It's been 40 years since I could say that to you. You'd cleaned up my mess from a New Year's celebration, back when the drinking age was 18, and had headed off to church on Jan. 1, 1969.

But a stroke grabbed you, later a lung carved away owing to those gosh-darn Chesterfields you loved so much.

Forty years ago, crippled on a chair, your eyes welled up watching men walk on the moon, because you'd worked on the space program with the U.S. Defense Department.

You'd come a long way from raising horses and helping priests in Ireland, jumping on a boat, landing in America around the Great Depression, getting your first job because of your peerless penmanship (nope, not genetic) and in the face of help-wanted ads that insisted: "No Irish need apply."

So, at age 19, I had to learn a lot about navigating the heath system, to help Mom care for you. I also heard my first Led Zeppelin album, missed Woodstock, bought my first Playboy (it was for you, of course -- yeah, right), saw Nixon take office, the Jets win the Superbowl and learned about a place called My Lai.

I worked with your physical therapists on your crippled arm, learned the limitations of a cane, how irksome it was for you to take a shower that required climbing into big-lipped bathtub. I learned that sometimes when hospitals called and said they needed us urgently, it was to fill out paperwork, not to say goodbye to you.

But that man on the moon, Dad. One of those riveting spirit-shaping times with you in a year that was mostly fingernails on a blackboard.

On Oct. 16,  you took a turn for the worse. We rode in an ambulance with you to Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. I kept checking your breathing, my finger under your nose. Moments after you were placed in a hospital bed, the nurse was on the phone to your doc: "The patient has apparently expired." Then, because my Mom was beyond words, the nurse handed the phone to this 150-pound, teen-age finger of quivering flesh.

The doc wanted my OK to do an autopsy, for the family records, but they needed my OK right that moment. Talk about the weight of the world, the callousness of bureaucracy.

"No"  -- it was the best, firmest I've ever mustered. Hours later, as I was buying a black funereal jacket, N.Y. Mets fans were pumping their car horns on the streets, shrieking about having won the World Series.

Actually, I won the World Series. You and Mom, a fellow soul of the Auld Sod, took a voyage of incredible daring and hope -- "one giant leap for mankind." Started a family in the New World. You helped me be the first person in the family to graduate from college. In witness to you, hopefully I'm helping Community Medical Centers to be the best place people can turn to for treatment and caring at every level.

One thing for sure, Dad, until the Lord took you 40 years ago, you didn't stop trying. I won't either. Love to you on Father's Day.

Your son -- as a memory to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren