This is an especially poignant Mother’s Day as my mom marks the 10th anniversary of her husband’s death today.

My father died at age 83 after losing a vicious fight with Parkinson’s disease.

I know my mother would encourage me to avoid the poignancy of the day and, instead, look for deeper meaning in his death.

I’ve been wrestling all week with that. But I have struggled.

To try to encapsulate someone’s legacy with a series of anecdotes about his life is to do an injustice to that legacy — or to be deceitful about both the legacy and the person.

After 10 years without my father, I have elevated him in my mind to the status of sainthood — reveling in the good memories and conveniently forgetting those not-so-good ones.

Truth be told, when my father died, he and I couldn’t really have a conversation of any substance. We simply had forgotten how.

But I need only to look to my wife to be reminded of the fact that my father was not a saint and was full of the complexities and fallibility that mark us all.

She met my father long after his struggle with Parkinson’s had begun, and the individual she got to know was an old, wheelchair-bound man already showing bitterness with the frailties of his life.

To this day, my wife is kind enough to avoid reminding me of that fact by simply saying, in particular to my children, she never really got to know my father. What I have come to understand, however, is that she is wrong.

And that may be one profound truth about his legacy: that it reveals itself to us at the most unexpected times.

It comes at moments when I make my wife laugh — both at herself and, especially, at me.

It comes at moments of pure exasperation when the kids and I are cutting up at the kitchen table and my wife looks at me and asks, “How many children do I have?”

It comes at moments when I can hold my entire family spellbound with a detailed story that has everyone waiting for the punch line.

Or it comes at those moments when I am quick to shed a tear at the injustice of life — or at a sappy TV commercial.

Of course, it also comes at times when I’m quick with anger or slow with patience.

These are all attributes of my father. My values were his values. My God was his God.

In the past decade, I have come to see a lot of my father in me. Most I like, some I don’t.

And the fascinating part for me is how much of my father I see in my children who hardly knew him or — in the case of my daughter — who never even met him.

In my oldest, I see an ability to communicate with 5-year-olds just as easily as he can communicate with his peers.

In my middle child, I see an intellectual hunger that is constantly stimulated by out-of-the-box thinking.

And in my youngest, I see an optimism with life that frequently borders on irreverence.

Certainly, we must acknowledge the complexities that mark us all by acknowledging the huge influence of my mother on me and — for my children — of my wife and her parents.

My hope is that as long as we acknowledge these attributes of our parents, we have a chance at enhancing the positive ones and changing the negative ones.

I have told my sons repeatedly, for example, that I didn’t know how to talk to my father when I became an adult, and I don’t intend for that to happen to them.

And that may be another profound truth for me about my father and his legacy: that just as we can forgive those bad memories of the parents we love, so too can we change and improve the attributes they bestowed on us.

But perhaps the more profound truth for me is that after 10 years of death, the man I loved so much is still very much a part of my life.

That truth would comfort my mother.

Carlos Sanchez is editor of the Tribune-Herald . Contact him at 757-5703 or csanchez@wacotrib.com.