My father died on June 5th. He was 87 and died in his sleep at my parents' home in Florida. The day before, he drove himself to the doctor to be treated for a bad cold. This was exactly the way he wanted to go. A few days later we had a memorial gathering by the beach down the street from the house, where people from the neighborhood come every evening to watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. Dad was a photographer for the Washington Post for 35 years so we put up lots of pictures of him, and of famous people he had photographed. There was a long obituary in the Post that day, and we printed it out from the paper's web site and posted it. We drank wine and shared anecdotes. My sister had found in the house a scrap of paper on which my father had copied down two verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!
Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd--"While you live
Drink!--for, once dead, you never shall return."
She read them aloud, and we toasted him as the sun set. The next day we scattered his ashes on his favorite beach.
The hardest part is dealing with my step-mother, who is bi-polar and went through yet another severe depression starting about 2 years ago. It's under control again but she is a shell of her old self and mentally adrift. My siblings and I had to move her immediately into an assisted-living facility because there was no way she could live on her own.
Until we got her moved into the home I couldn't properly mourn my father because we were so preoccupied with her situation. The day before I flew back to France I rode my father's bike to the library to check my email. Before I left the house my sister handed me her iPod and told me to listen to Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Beyond the Missouri Sky album. I skipped directly to the piece "Spiritual" because I knew Annie Proulx had listened to it while writing the dozy embrace scene. I had seen Brokeback in Florida with my parents when I was visiting them at the height of my step-mother's crisis and afterwards I'd been a wreck -- heartshot on top of heartbroken. I remembered the shot of the DECEASED postcard, and how a silent ripple had gone through the audience full of old people. I had shed tears not just for Jack but also for my father, who I knew was failing. Listening to that haunting music while pedaling slowly in the stifling tropical heat, brought back that week when my heart had felt like a heavy stone in my chest, and I just lost it. Fortunately, nobody walks around outside at midday in Florida in the summer so I could sob unobserved.
I hadn't planned to post anything here, or at such length. But losing your last parent is a rite of passage and I thought I should write it all down in this forum, where I have spent so much time.