Meditations on Dad’s Death

Dad died about a month ago. As the appointed personal representative to oversee his estate, I have been handling that task with alacrity, as he would have wanted. The duties are considerable and somewhat complicated. The process is slow and compound by the sluggish nature of others involved.

His service at the veteran’s cemetery is in two weeks. It will be short, as he desired: military honors, three poems. No testimonials. No religious invocations. Toward the end of his life, poetry mattered to him a lot more than Christianity. There were truer answers and observations in the poems he recited to me than all the verses in the Bible he knew by memory.

Sometimes I drive by his assisted living center and mistakenly turn into the parking lot. Visiting him there almost daily for almost three three years was the central part of my life. It’s been strange not performing that service anymore.

While clearing out some drawers I found a bundle of his sermons from the early 1960s. Fascinating reading and deep look into his mind and faith at that time. But all of that changed for him when reality hit for him a decade later and his thinking evolved.

I plan on relocating back to the Oregon Coast in several months and start a new phase of my life. The plan is to find the grittiest community because I want that in a community and it’s all I can afford. It will be wonderful to reconnect with the ocean on a daily basis and run Elmer the maniacal husky for hours and hours and hours. Who knows what great notions will emerge from that experience. And it’s high time I started building driftwood forts again.

I will know absolutely no one wherever I move. But as my dad counseled me decades ago when I first moved to the Oregon Coast: you make friends where you are.

Amen to that.