It’s hard to imagine Dad gone. I mean really gone. Dead. Even now—one week after death—he’s most likely lying in some cold metal container, not yet turned to ash. That frightens and hurts me, if for no other reason than I want to have no more image of him trapped in his body. And yet of course I know he’s not “there” anymore; what remains is only a corpse, a biologically-negated flesh-suit. I remember with vivid, cutting accuracy his pallid, cold blue face after expiration, his hollow, bloodless cheeks, and his blank, marble eyes. I closed those eyes. His body morphed from semi-warm and slow-shallow breathing to a hard plastic mannequin who had supposedly once been my father. Bizarre, this notion we call death. Terrifying. Yet a full and complete release from this condition we call human, that sinister and complex mechanism of evolution and natural selection. I wanted to know my father fully, and, as much as anyone can with someone like that, I did know him intimately for twenty-three staggering, haunted months. He is free now, unchained from the spasm known as human consciousness. He is finished with the project we call being a social animal. His awareness has been snuffed out like a flame shut down by dirt. I almost worried, once, that he didn’t love me. Now I know it was me who once didn’t love myself. In death my father left me, but in sickness I got to know him. For that I will never be sorry, painful as the whole affair may have been. True beauty stems from knowing we exist in finitude. That this experiment in existence will eventually, for all of us, be extinguished. This need not be the scary, reprehensible phenomenon we abhor, deny, run away from all our lives. Instead we can look, face, sigh at and ultimately embrace it. Death seethes with anticipation; it is always there, looking smugly over our shoulders, grinning, saying, Just wait; just wait. And wait we must, until our time arrives. I don’t know about you, but I want to live as much as I can before then, both internally and externally.
I want to hold the cup of love and life and drink from it now.