Dad

My dad died two years ago Monday–on a Saturday.

He died on April 16, which was Saturday in 2005 and Sunday in 2006. Today is the Saturday closest to April 16, so is today the day I should be marking? He died on the third Saturday of April, which is next week.

But it was also the third Saturday after Easter, which might have more relevance: I’d been home for Easter, which was the last I saw him conscious…. He had the heart attack the Sunday after, had surgery the following Wednesday, and died the second Saturday after that.

The third Saturday after Easter this year is April 28.

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Why am I talking about this so pedantically?

I think it’s because I’ve never really talked about it. Written about it, I mean. I almost literally jumped out of bed this morning to write something about it, having mentally composed the first part of this entry. In the time it took me to fire up this computer and sit down to write, I lost the desire/spirit/will to write it. I have no experience writing anything about it. Other than the obituary.

I don’t have a copy of the obituary. I don’t have a copy of the newspaper feature that ran along with the obituary, where they interviewed several of his former colleagues and students. Maybe I have those somewhere in the files and just forgot. But I’m so spoiled by Factiva.com that I haven’t felt pressured to make sure I have copies and have them at hand.

That’s not who I want to be: a guy who wrote but doesn’t have handy a copy of his father’s obituary.

That sounds odd. But it’s not who I want to be. I’m not the guy who isn’t close to his family. I’m the guy who enjoys double negatives, but I’m not the guy who isn’t close to his family. I call my mom every week; I get back to Ohio maybe five or six times a year. My sister and I are close. (Closer now that we’re hundreds of miles apart than when we lived in the same house.) I’ve never been able to fully relate to people who aren’t close to their families.

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Not sure why I’m focusing on an obituary so much. Maybe because he died on Saturday afternoon and I started writing it on Saturday night…104 weeks ago to the hour.

Maybe because I haven’t taken a step back to reflect on how odd an experience it was to write it. Sitting around in the family room, me with a yellow legal pad and a red pen writing down what my mom and sister were saying. Just as if I were sitting down with the Congressman, taking notes for a form letter to send out to constituents. I’ve done that numerous times; this was too similar. Then I trundled off to the computer and typed. I printed out drafts and brought them back to the family room for review–same thing I’ve done at the office. The only thing making it different than a constituent letter was the lack of a little sign-off box for everyone to initial.

Then I e-mailed the obituary to the funeral home.

That’s odder yet. Shouldn’t these things be printed out on fancy paper–even parchment–and hand-delivered somewhere? By courier, even? Shouldn’t there be a service you can call, and someone comes to your house in a black suit and white gloves and you hand him a cream-colored envelope for delivery to the funeral home? Nope–just zap it right over, and then the funeral home zaps it to all the area newspapers. And here’s a picture to scan and zap along with it.

That’s how I did it. And I didn’t print out a fancy copy even for myself.

I still have it on the computer at home, of course, and can print reams of fancy copies next time I’m in Ohio. So this is not a big deal. Why am I spending so much time on it? How did I get from wanting to talk about my dad to obsessing about the obituary? Where exactly is this post headed content-wise?

It’s probably coming ’round to Romans 7:15, same as quite a bit else in my life: the stuff I’m doing isn’t the stuff I want to be doing: it’s the stuff I hate. The not-writing-about-my-dad stuff is the stuff I hate, or at least know I should hate. The not-staying-in-touch-with-friends-like-I-should stuff is the stuff I hate. I was inspired this week by a post on the magnificent Lone Prairie blog about that very topic–specifically the need to communicate with those we care about.

I pledge to work on that. For immediate purposes, though, a tangential pledge: I will start writing more about my dad–funny things, serious things, memories in general. And I’ll put them up here and reflect on them often.

And–first thing I do next time I’m in Ohio: print out a fancy copy of that obituary.