I was a posthumous child. My father’s eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish association with his white grave-stone in the churchyard, and the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were —almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it.

From “David Copperfield,” by Charles Dickens

With keen insight, Charles Dickens expresses a child’s feelings toward the father who had died before the boy was born.   My father was also a posthumous child. He was born a few months after my grandfather had died of the Spanish flu in 1918. He never talked about this misfortune. It was too painful for him. If you want to know more about my father, read the story entitled “Victoria Beach” on this blog under “The Silver Teacup.”