That last entry seems like a long time ago.My dad died on Wednesday evening. He had been really declining, and in the few days before was delirious and not really recognizing anyone. And although he didn't know who we were, one of us was there around the clock at the end to make sure he wasn't in any pain (ie, insisting to the nursing staff that they up his drugs when necessary so that he stayed out of distress, and preferably asleep).
He had been asleep all day when it happened. I was there most of the day, and my mom came to relieve me, and then it happened a few hours later. The rest has been a blur of arrangements and relatives and crying but stoic mom and The Boy sleeping on the air mattress while she stays with us and my brother and I counting out money and a sea of relatives and endless refrains of how Everything Happens For A Reason (ugh) and Whaddayagunnahdo? When someone dies of a terminal illness in Brooklyn, an onslaught of the latter is unavoidable.
Today was hard. Early funeral, burial, fish lunch, etc. Our friends that knew my dad traveled to get there, some of them last night for the wake also, and I was really touched.
There was a horrifically rambling and inarticulate speech by the priest at the funeral this morning, in which he compared my father's passing to a SCHOOL GRADUATION, before tumbling into other stupid and unintelligible tangents. I stayed up last night trying to write something to say today at the service and failed, and when I heard this horrible speech I felt even worse. Then I remembered that my classical literature-quoting father loved making Socrates references, and I found an appropriate passage in Plato's Apology and read it later at the hall and doing that made me feel better even though I read it all shaky.
Here's what I read:
Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? [...] What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?