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LIVING WITH IMPERMANENCE

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Oh very young, what will you leave us this time?

You're only dancin' on this earth for a short while.

And though your dreams may toss and turn you now,

They will vanish away like your dad's best jeans, 

Denim blue, faded up to the sky.

And though you want them to last forever,

You know they never will,

You know they never will,

And the patches make the goodbye harder still.

 

       These lyrics from Cat Stevens make me want to write a piece devoted to someone who, as Salieri said to Mozart in Amadeus, deserved a proper requiem but never got one.  Let me begin with the ending, then share an overview of the life of my father, Mark Albert Reicherter (born into this world on February 9, 1942, and left it on March 1, 2024), and conclude with final thoughts of a practical and constructive nature for living properly in a world filled with death.  Those whose loved ones are healthy one minute and then suffer a sudden demise are tortured by the fact that they never had a chance to say good-bye while the person was alive and conscious.  On the other hand, those whose loved ones linger for years are tormented by having to watch a family member deteriorate with no hope of recovery.  For the last two years of his life, Dad was in his own room in a care home tucked away down a quiet street.  Mom visited him every day (usually twice a day) and the rest of us visited when we were able.  In the beginning, we could still get him into the car to drive around or even take him home for the afternoon.  Each time I saw Dad, I imagined him as he was back in the 90s.  It seems like only yesterday.  I envisioned him driving through town in his old blue Toyota pickup, a Western Bacon Cheeseburger in one hand and our two dogs, Max and Jones, hanging out the rear windows of the camper shell (he would often buy another burger for the dogs to share, or an extra ice cream cone), on his way to do something that seemed all-important at the time: buy or sell books at the bookstore, visit garage sales, estate sales, or thrift stores looking for treasures (usually for others), do some shopping, hang out at the fairgrounds, drop off an article he had written for the local newspaper, drive up to Lake Tahoe to make some bets on sports and eat at a buffet, stop at the community television station to interview some local personality on his show (People and Places) or just drive down a particular street so the dogs could bark at some local frienemy canines (who would wait all day for the sound of his truck).  People used to call him the Mayor of Camino because he lived as freely as if he owned the place.  In my imagination, the middle-aged, healthy, and independent version of Dad sailed past us, heading east on Main Street, but in reality we turned up the narrow lane to visit the older, terminal version.  It seemed wrong that a man who gave so much happiness to so many others should pass away in a little room with only a few people present.  If all his friends from all the years gone by could have been there with him, they would have filled a large auditorium.  Then one day it happens, and the person who brought you into this world, raised you, fed you, clothed you, cared for you, taught you right from wrong (usually), and loved you with all their heart is no more.  I wish the whole world knew him as I knew him.

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       My dad was born in San Dimas, California two months after America entered World War Two.  His father was a Los Angeles County sheriff and his mother worked part time.  He had one older brother.  The boys were generally loved, but my grandpa was an unhappy person with anger issues, so corporal punishment was excessive.  In a family where most people seemed to be frowning most of the time, my dad always had an impish grin.  He loved humor.  His jokes were often inappropriate and misplaced, and they often got him into trouble, but he never stopped.  The main reason for this, I think, was his determination not to let his parents’ grumpiness get him down.  Another important reason was his lifelong goal of always trying to bring cheer to others.  Dad loved baseball and he was good at it.  He kept a few trophy baseballs, including one from a no-hitter that he pitched when he was only twelve, along with a lot of newspaper clipping from games he won.  In high school, he also played basketball and football, but it was as a pitcher in baseball that he had his earliest glory days. 

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       After high school, Dad had surgery on his left elbow due to damage from pitching, and it was this that kept him out of the draft for the Vietnam War later.  Never a great student, Dad didn’t go to college right away.  First he tried working for parks and recreation to get kids into physical activity.  Later, he opened his own trophy shop.  I knew him only as a father, but when I see black and white pictures of him around age 20 – a full, legal adult, but still single and free as a bird, with his whole life ahead of him – it always makes me think of of him in a whole new way: as a young man who could have chosen a different path than to become my father.  I remember the scene at the end of Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner meets his own dad from a time before he became a father, and I imagine what it must have been like for him to be 20.  I can see Dad in the Southern California desert, driving around in his VW bug with his black Labrador, Moose, hanging out the window.  He’s wondering where he should live, what he should do, who he should marry, how many kids to have: all the big questions that would dictate the majority of his life.  From my vantage point in 2024, I know how the rest of his story plays out, but for Dad at that moment in time, the future was just a glimmer on the horizon.  I know it's silly, but I can't help but wonder: if some intergalactic Doctor Who set the coordinates of their TARDIS for the summer of 1962, would they find Dad with a dog and a fishing pole somewhere along Highway 395?  Of course if he hadn’t followed the course he did from that point forward, I wouldn’t be here, and for that I am eternally grateful.

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       It was in August or September of 1964 that he met my mother.  She had been born in Holland in 1943 and had come to America when she was 13.   One of their first dates was to see the movie Mary Poppins.  Dad had to join the Dutch Reformed Church in order to get her parents on board with their engagement.  One of the earliest 8mm home movie clips I have of my dad shows him with Mom on a sofa.  Always a wild and crazy guy, he holds up a can of something that looks like whipped cream, puts it to his mouth, throws his head back, and pretends to drink it.  On September 10, 1965, they were married.  I was born three years later and my brother three years after that.  During this period, Dad went to night school and got a degree in sociology.  They had a lot of stress over money.  Dad worked as a prison guard for a while, and he related that there was once a riot among the inmates.  He was the lowest man on the totem pole, so they gave him a pistol and a shotgun and made him stay behind in the room where prisoners’ records were kept while all other staff members evacuated temporarily.  It was lucky for all of us that he survived the night.  I was kept blissfully unaware of these traumatic episodes.  I remember mostly good things from those days: driving on the "bunny rabbit road" at night to see my grandparents in Hemet (Dad would speed over the hills so we would catch a little air in the VW, then spot rabbits in the high-beams as they scattered in the distance), taking me to see planes come in for a landing at the airport, going to Disneyland, playing outdoors, riding my Big Wheel, watching TV shows like Johnny Quest, Gilligan's Island, Speed Racer, and Scooby Doo from a fort made from couch cushions, pretending to be the Mummy (Mom or Dad would play the unsuspecting archaeologist, and would read the curse tablet while I stood like a statue with folded hands, waiting to be activated, again and again), taking me to see a giant talking balloon-pumpkin for Halloween, making Christmas decorations, or playing with toy trains.  Dad was always nearby, trying to seize the moment – always thinking of fun things for us to do, always trying to be the best dad he could be.

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       Following Dad's work assignments in the Department of Corrections, we moved from LA to Morro Bay for a brief stay, then to an apartment in Sacramento when I was about five, then bought a house in Fair Oaks when I was six.  We lived there, on Earnscliff Avenue, for 11 years.  On school nights when Mom was in night school at CSUS studying accounting, Dad would let us stay up past our bedtime.  One thing we did was stack up cardboard tubes, put wax on the linoleum, then (wearing socks) run and slide into the wall of tubes to make them collapse on us.  When we heard the sound of Mom’s car coming back, we would run through the house turning off all the lights, jump into bed, and pretend to be asleep (as if we were fooling anyone).  Dad took us to see a lot of movies.  One film experience stood out among all others: he had read in the newspaper about a new movie called Star Wars that almost no one had heard of yet, and we made to the last showing at Century 21 Theater (the cool dome theaters they used to have) on the first day it was released, which happened to be my ninth birthday.  The lobby was empty because everyone was crammed into the theater, half of them wearing weird costumes.  There were only a few seats left in the very front row.  It was a bit surreal, as the crowd was completely silent while we took our seats.  They all seemed to know something we didn't.  Then the lights dimmed.  The movie began with the unlikely words, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way," and the rest was history.  To say we were blown away by Star Wars would be the understatement of the century.  I saw it ten times in the first year.  Dad also took us to see The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on opening day, even though it meant taking us out of school and missing work.  He took us to the drive-in theater with our VW van facing backwards, my brother and I laying in the back in sleeping bags to watch fun B movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.  We had hamsters in a little plastic Jetsons-style house, and Dad gave a few tearful eulogies after they escaped and were found dead.  Dad tried to set a good example for us by reading books, buying a 1978 set of encyclopedias (which I still have), and investing in a giant dictionary in which he made us look up words we didn’t know.  He hated the movie Bridge on the River Kwai, and so whenever we wanted him to chase us, we would put the theme music from the movie on the record player.  He would pretend to go berserk and chase us into whatever ambush we had prepared.  It always looked something like Godzilla attacking Tokyo, with pillows and other projectiles flying everywhere.  Whether it was wrestling, arm wrestling, or a pillow fight, Dad would always lose so convincingly that we thought we were invincible.  On New Year’s Day of 1980, he wrote a giant number 80 in the street with gasoline and lit it.  The scorch-marks were visible for years.  We have a picture of him from that night, yelling with glee and pushing a piece of wood with a sparking firework attached to it.  He used to let us do things that were great fun at the time that I never would have allowed as a father, like light arrows on fire and shoot them down the street, blow things up with improvised pyrotechnics in the back yard, launch ground bloom flowers off a bridge to see how they would burn underwater, or have bottle rocket wars (using safety goggles, of course).  He was always taking us to donut shops and 7-11s to buy comic books and candy.  He was always on the lookout for whatever we were into at our age: parks with spiral slides for us to put our toy cars down (sometimes at night), or, when we were older, rated-R movies like The Terminator.  We went to Disneyland every year and Dad went with us on our favorite rides till he got tired and just waited for us at the exit while we ran around in circles (lines were shorter back then on weekdays in spring and fall).  We got a little motor home (I think it was a 1977 Dodge Sportsman) and took trips all over the West, going as far north as the fossil-rich badlands of Alberta as far east as Mt. Rushmore.  Dad bought a raft and a bunch of inner tubes for us to use on the American River every summer.  On Halloween, Dad took us to some apartments (to get the highest possible candy-per-step ratio) and we had filled entire pillow sacks by the time the night was over.  I especially remember sitting on the front porch with Dad as he told me about what life was like when he was a kid, way back in the olden days of the 40s and 50s (30 years in the past, which seems like an eternity when you're little), when a bottle of Coke was five cents and they used hand-pumps to spray DDT on bugs that came into the house. 

 

       In 1985, we moved to the town of Camino, just east of Placerville.  Mom and Dad both worked in Sacramento, so they had to commute, but they each only worked half time, so one of them was always at home.  We got a couple of dogs that were being given away free in Sacramento in July of 1985, on our way back from seeing Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.  We named them Max and Jones, after Mad Max and Indiana Jones.  Max was a stray and Jones was from a litter.  With the dogs beside us, we camped, hiked, swam, shot guns, and fished all over the Sierra, although we mostly favored the Silver Fork area.  Dad was always full of humor, but I was especially amused by one thing he said when he wasn't even trying to be funny.  We were driving down to Placerville one time and he said, "I don't know when this presidential library thing got started.  Carter had a library.  Ford didn't deserve an outhouse.  Nixon should have had a prison."  Once when Mom scolded him for letting the dogs chase cats off our land, he said, "This is private property."  She said, "Oh, yeah, like the cat knows all about private property."  He smiled and answered, "It knows now."

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       As hard as he tried to be light-hearted and fun, Dad was often beset with irritability, impatience, anxiety, and depression, tendencies that he clearly inherited from his father.  He obsessed over economics, politics, and social injustice.  He had an awful habit of chewing his fingernails and spitting out the torn-off bits.  I can still picture him watching the news and doing this, concerned that the world was going to hell in a handbasket.  He saw his parents’ decline in health and became morose about the fact that they would die one day.  In 1988, he went to a doctor and was prescribed antidepressants.  He was given different medications over the years, but he never stopped taking these until the end.  If only I knew then what I know now, perhaps I could have intervened and stopped his use of these psychotropic drugs, but as I recall, I didn’t even know he was taking them until some point in the late 90s.

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       Dad never liked his work very much until he was about to retire.  For a while, he was a parole officer.  Then he reviewed contracts for the State of California for outside companies to provide care to the developmentally disabled.  In his final year, he was the safety officer for his building.  He told me this was the first time in his life that he actually enjoyed his job because he was able to help people and make a difference in their lives.  His dream job probably would have been as a sports reporter for a newspaper, but he never had any such opportunity.  Dad wasn't a fancy dresser ordinarily, but he always had to wear a suit, tie, and shined leather shoes for work.  When I go to work early in the morning, and especially when things happen that are less than enjoyable, I often think of Dad and the sacrifices he made over all those years to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table.  He must have suffered all kinds of difficulties and indignities that he never shared with any of us.  As the decades of my own career roll by like numbers on an odometer, I often imagine what on-the-job Dad would say if he were able to reach across time and space – like Bogart in Play it Again, Sam, or Chef Gusteau in Ratatouille – to share a heartfelt comment about the reality of the daily grind and the meaning of it all.  He had a special talent for getting to the heart of a matter with a few expletive-laced statements.

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       When I went away to study in Australia in the second half of 1989, he told me he felt like he was in mourning because he missed me so much.  I know it was hard for him when I went to live and study in Taiwan for five years, but I did come home to visit every year.  He was stuck taking care of our dogs after my brother and I moved away – not that he minded – but it was a big responsibility, and he was never thanked enough for this.  They pretty much became his dogs from that point on.  His own father passed away in January of 1989, and his mother passed away in December of 1995.  He got in one good joke when his mother was living with us.  I dropped something in the kitchen and he turned to his mother and said with a sigh, "It's hard to find good help these days," which made her break up laughing.  Both of these losses were very hard for him to take.  Grandma’s death was especially rough, because he was always closer to her, and because she stayed in our house for the last couple of months on hospice.

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       Dad used to visit an old folks’ care home (not the same one where he later stayed) with  Max, so that Max could walk around and cheer up the residents.  Max was a one-of-a-kind orange dog (we think he was part Chow, part golden retriever, and we frankly have no idea what else).  Max knew the routine.  He would saunter from room to room like a pro and the people would light up, hugging and petting him as well as they were able.  One elderly man said that Max saved his life, and Dad wrote that into an article for the local newspaper, revealing only at the end that his silent partner, Max, was a dog.  Jones passed away first, followed by Max in 1999.  Even after this, Dad continued to carry treats in his pockets – so he could feed other people’s dogs when he encountered them on the street.  

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       That brings us to 1996-2007, the eleven-year era which we could call his final glory days.  This is where, as I described at the start, the Dad of my imagination was retired but still fully healthy.  He had the money and time to do whatever he wanted.  He and Mom went all over the West, up into Canada a few times, and even to China and Europe.  In 2001, Dad became a grandpa and was surprised by how much he enjoyed it.  He spoiled all his grandkids with toys and ice cream, and engaged in countless swordfights in which he, the slow-moving Captain Hook, was sliced, skewered, and diced by the fleet-footed Peter Pan.  One of our favorite things to do every year was to watch the Fourth of July parade in Pollock Pines (Dad had once accidentally brought up the rear of the parade, applauded by the crowd as he drove the old blue bomber with the dogs hanging out the windows), have water-gun fights around the house, go see some fireworks, then head to Carson City the following day to see the mine in the Nevada State Museum and ride the rails at the Nevada State Railroad Museum.  Grandpa had a very good life.  He lived a comfortable, middle-class existence, mostly in peacetime, in the most prosperous country on the planet.  He could, at a whim, drive to some of the most beautiful places in the world.  And yet, as good as those days were, he confided in me a number of times that he sometimes felt like he just wanted to get in the truck and drive away, far away – anywhere – to escape.  He never said what he wanted to run away from or where he wanted to go; it was just a gnawing, indescribable sensation of wanting to flee.  I have felt something similar at times as I get older.  Part of it stems from stress, part of it comes from the overwhelming sense of the world situation spiraling out of control and the helplessness we feel as individuals to fix it, and part of it is from the innate terror we mortals have as we grow older: knowing that our time is running out like sand through the hourglass and there is nothing we can do to stop it, nowhere to hide from it.  I assume this was what Dad experienced.  

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       There are myriad other side stories I could tell about Dad – his stock trading, his photography, his loud rock and roll music with speakers the size of refrigerators, his attempts to lose weight, the way he read tabloids like The Enquirer, his large collection of books on the Old West, and so on – but in the summer of 2007, at the age of 65, he had a very bad seizure.   I will always believe it was caused by his long-term use of antidepressants.  Anyway, this seizure was like a stroke in that it destroyed part of his brain and made it difficult to form new memories.  When he came out of his coma, without waiting to find out why he was in the hospital, he immediately went into a round of "Take my wife, please" jokes to entertain whoever was nearby.  All we needed was a set of drums and cymbals to turn the hospital room into a comedy club.  After the seizure he couldn’t drive anymore, was dependent on my mother, and was required to take antiseizure medications every day – which damaged his liver and God only knows what else.  He experienced a slow decline over the next 12 years.  He would forget most recent events after about five minutes, but he lived in the moment and he continued to be a big part of the family.  He loved to play Sudoku, watch football, and laugh at old re-runs of The Phil Silvers Show.  He and Mom would go with my brother's family to drive dune buggies in Death Valley every winter.  One time when we were on our way back from Leavenworth, Dad (who couldn't have told you where he had been all day) saw a billboard for a small hamburger and yelled out, "That thing is a rip-off!"  He always remembered the truly important details in life.  Once at a buffet, after everyone had eaten to the point of bursting and the plates had been cleared off the table, Dad forgot the meal was over and asked if people were ready to go load up on some food.  I would have nice conversations with him on the phone, but knew that within a few minutes of hanging up, he would have forgotten the whole thing.  It was at least comforting to know that he was cozy in his Hobbit-hole with his TV, his computer, his Sudoku, and of course Mom.  Then Dad had a more rapid decline from 2019 onward.  By 2020, he was having trouble walking anywhere without assistance and started using a cane.  He lost interest in sports, Sudoku, and television.  His sense of balance deteriorated, and he spent up to 12 hours a day sleeping.  This brings us full circle to the end, when he fell and broke his hip in October of 2021 and wound up in his bed in the care home, where I began this story.  The last time I saw him was the morning of February 20th.  One of the final things he said to me in person was to ask, "You have the keys for the pickup?" as if it was 1987 and I had just come back from community college.  I assured him I did, even though the blue Toyota had been gone for decades.  "You be careful out there," he advised me, which made me wince, since the concept of "out there" had become an abstraction for him, as he was never again going to leave his bed, let alone his room.  In the week after that, he kept telling me "I love you" over the phone, his voice growing weaker until I couldn't make out the words anymore.  The day he passed away, a big oak tree collapsed on the road leading to Mom and Dad’s house, followed by a historic blizzard hitting the entire length of the Sierra.  I take these as heaven’s recognition of his passing.  I will try to filter out the bad memories connected with his last two years and remember him instead as he was in his prime: taking us to see movies when we were kids, taking us to the brand new theme park called EPCOT back in '83, eating at the Harrah's Lake Tahoe buffet with the top-floor view, crashing through the underbrush to find the perfect spot for catching trout, singing his "Summerquest" song to the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark, coming back home with a cup of coffee and the morning paper as the rest of us were just waking up (he delighted in letting the dogs jump on my bed and attack me if I slept too late) – having already made the rounds once on his own and planned out our options for the day's activities, driving around looking for goodies at estate sales (either to resell or to give away as gifts), laughing with glee as he pursued a slow-moving, terrified jogger being followed by a rogue mongrel (with both our dogs hanging out the sides of the truck, barking themselves hoarse at the dog – the poor guy turned to look, then did a horrified double-take as he tried to make sense of the Cerberus-like nightmare that was bearing down on him), taking his grandson on a VIP tour of the local fire department where he could pretend to drive the fire engine, or in friendly competition with his friend Marcy in their perennial search for the Golden Grail: the best burrito in the greater Sacramento area.  He was always thinking of a way to put a smile on other peoples’ faces, even when he was crying on the inside.  As long as he was breathing, there was a comfort in feeling that we could still access all those Christmases, all those adventures in the Magic Kingdom, all those camping trips, and all those sporting events (participated in, watched on TV, or listened to on the radio) from the 1940s onward by gliding down the root structure of his memories, like sailors on a fiber optic highway.  When his life story reached its conclusion, this connection to the past was abruptly severed, and it felt as if all those moments in time were lost – like tears in the rain.  His life, which means so much to me, will now inevitably fade from human memory to the point where it will mean as little to future generations as black and white pictures from the 1800s mean to me.  My dad, who once upon a time held me in his arms (as I used to hold my own son), is gone forever.  I have a grown son of my own now, but I can never forget that he used to be my daddy and I used to be his little boy – his pride and joy, his reason for living.  The tears come every time I think of it this way.  I have to face the fact that from March 1, 2024 until eternity, he will never be my dad again.  That chapter is closed.  It is hard to see the sun come up each day and know that he is no longer here to watch it with us.  Transitioning to thinking of him in the past tense has been difficult, but now he belongs to the ages.

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       I know I am not the first person in this world to lose a member of their nuclear family and I will not be the last.  As a historian, I was fully aware this was going to happen, but when the event finally arrived, it nevertheless reverberated with the force of a gong.  It is one thing to read about the deaths of countless others in history books; it is something else entirely when it happens to you – like the difference between watching the crash scene in Castaway and experiencing it for yourself.  This disconnect between knowing something intellectually and grasping it with the totality of your being is not new.  Around 2,500 years ago, the Buddha was approached by a woman named Kisa Gautami who requested that he bring her son back to life.  He responded by asking her to first bring him a mustard seed from a home where no one had ever died.  She spent the day going from house to house, but everywhere the answer was the same.  Not a single household was free from the scourge of death.  Eventually, Kisa realized that this was the lesson the Buddha wanted her to learn: life and death are inseparable.  She accepted the passing of her child and devoted herself to the Dharma.  It is one thing to know that death is inevitable, but quite another thing to experience the stabbing grief when it happens within your own family.  Your soul cries out a series of unanswerable questions.  How can we go on without them?  How can the world exist in the absence of that unique person who shined their light so brightly?  How can an end to our lamentation be anything but a betrayal of their memory?  How can any memorial adequately tell future generations about their greatness?  How can we, the living, ever honor them enough for what they gave us, since they provided the physical form and nurturing that allows us to exist at all?  How can we ever show enough gratitude?  How can we be happy in a world where death is the ultimate end of all living things?  When we watch a loved one pass away, we are also in a sense watching ourselves pass away, as well as all our other loved ones, including our own children and grandchildren.  The sheer futility of life feels overwhelming.  It doesn't seem possible that this intense emotion I feel is the same as what everyone has felt over all of history, but it must be so.  Recognizing this fact is an important step in developing compassion for others, and thinking about them instead of just yourself and your own loss.  It may be that for the dead there is no sadness in death, as with the spirit of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, but for the living, there is an infinite melancholy attached to this subject that threatens to engulf us in black depression.  If we viewed the matter with complete wisdom and objectivity, we would feel only thankfulness for having had the opportunity to know our loved ones at all, but until we reach that stage, death remains a highly-emotional topic.  The usual response people have is to put death as far out of our minds as possible.  The spiritual response is to meet the challenge head-on.  

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       In Buddhism, facing death is central to the entire religion.  Shakyamuni Buddha began his Dharma with the Four Noble Truths.  The first of these is that life is suffering (“dukkha” in the Pali language).  When Westerners hear this, we naturally want to argue: “No, I am enjoying my life, not suffering!”  The Buddha wasn’t saying there is no such thing as temporary enjoyment.  He was pointing out that, no matter how much we may enjoy each passing moment, there is unavoidable suffering at the end because of old age, sickness, and death, and there is suffering even in the knowledge that life, no matter how good it may seem at the moment, must come to an end.  The word “dukkha” has also been translated as unsatisfactory or deficient.  We all want to live forever, but we know we never can.  This alone makes life in physical form unsatisfactory.  The Second Noble Truth says that suffering is caused by desire.  This could describe any attachment to a thing or an experience, including the desire to go on  living.  The Third Noble Truth says that when desire ends, suffering ends, and the Fourth Noble Truth explains that the way to end desire is to follow the Eightfold Path, which lists all the things that must be done correctly in order to lead one to enlightenment.  Rather than try to put the idea of death out of their minds, Buddhists try to constantly remind themselves that all things, including life, are impermanent.  This provides a logical reason and a powerful motivation not to stray from the Eightfold Path.  As the Wheel of Life diagram shows, all beings in the six realms are doomed to die and be reincarnated, but an enlightened Buddha is beyond the reach of Yama, the King of Death.  Shakyamuni told us to be a lamp unto ourselves and declared that everyone can become enlightened if we practice with diligence.

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       We need to view life and death differently, and this shift must be part and parcel of a whole new way of thinking and living.  Our attitude towards death needs to become an integral part of a more spiritual mindset because only this can ensure world peace.  We cannot continue to treat life as something that goes on forever and refuse to think about death because it is a downer.  This was demonstrated very well in the scene from the movie Barbie, when, in the midst of dancing in Barbie-land, where every day is the best day ever, Barbie suddenly asks her friends, “You guys ever think about dying?”  The music stops at once and everyone stares at her in dismay.  What a total buzz-kill.  While not as fun as a trip to Disneyland, death is a powerful topic and it has the ability to get our attention.  If properly contemplated, it can be harnessed in a positive way to transform our character, making us calm, caring, and thoughtful.  During the Renaissance, Francesco Guicciardini wrote, "It is a remarkable fact that we must all die, and yet we all live as if we were to live forever."  Shakyamuni Buddha declared that if we only realized how everything we experience ends the moment we die, all our quarrels would cease at once (Dhammapada, verse six).  When I get upset, I often try to to regain perspective by reminding myself that one day I (like my own dad) will no longer get to be a daddy.  We should not take life, health, or prosperity for granted.  We cannot continue having collective amnesia about impermanence and allow unimportant things to make us angry.  We must be loving in all our interactions.  Look at the way we treat one another with more kindness after watching Scrooge at Christmas, but then go right back to committing acts of road rage in January.  We must remember that it's a wonderful life we have been given: an amazing opportunity to do good.  The gut-punch we feel when a loved one passes away must be re-awakened in us on a daily basis with meditation on death and impermanence, otherwise the abstract understanding that life doesn’t last forever will not translate into the deep-seated, first-person realization that we need in order to make a permanent change.  If old age, sickness, and death did not exist, Siddhartha would have been an immortal, and he (along with everyone else who ever lived) would all still be partying like college kids on spring break, or Barbie in her neon-pink dreamhouse.  This is not how the universe works, and we need to stop pretending like it is.  When we do not view the world through a spiritual lens, we do not make introspection and self-perfection the highest priorities, and this leads to egotism, selfishness, intransigent opinions, conflict, hatred, insults, violence, chaos, and war.  When people identify too much with the group to which they happen to belong in this current life, they make up their minds about what they want based on very limited, biased input, and they incorrectly determine that it is worth killing others who are different from themselves to get their way.  If you want concrete examples of this, just watch the nightly news.

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       The sadness surrounding death and impermanence is a universal challenge that must be overcome by achieving wisdom.  This requires constant effort.  As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, ". . . the wise man, climbing the terraced heights of wisdom, looks down upon the rest.  Free from sorrow he looks upon the sorrowing crowd, as one that stands on a mountain looks down upon those who stand upon the plain."  We must remember that the glimpse we see of a person’s spirit in their brief earthly incarnation is only one facet of an infinitely-large diamond, and the part of their soul’s story that we share in one lifetime is but a single chapter in a never-ending book.  In the broad scope of things, feeling sorrow over the loss of our loved ones is like grieving over a caterpillar because it goes into a cocoon, not realizing that a butterfly will emerge later, then evolve into a phoenix, a dragon, and so on until it becomes one with God: infinite, perfect, eternal, interdimensional, and indescribably radiant.  No one who died is ever really gone.  In an incredibly long process of spiritual evolution, we are becoming something more, something greater.  For the soul, these changes of body are like changes of clothes – until the spirit no longer needs to wear a physical form and expands to encompass the entire universe.  We will all meet again someday, though not in the same shapes as we remember from this lifetime.  I am convinced we have all appeared in many plays wearing different masks, each time mistaking our role in the play for our true identity.  We have to stop defining ourselves according to our temporary role of this life, and remember that we are eternal light-spirits, possessing sequential lives that extend through all of time like an infinite string of pearls.  As Yoda said, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."  When we meet again, we will be light-bodies, essentially standing on heaps of discarded masks the size of Mount Everest.  Though the details may vary in each religion’s version of the afterlife, the ultimate ending is never oblivion; it is bliss, unity, perfection, and omniscience.  This is where my dad, as well as your dear departed loved ones – and all of us, ultimately – will wind up.  The universe’s process of becoming is vast and mysterious, but the purpose will be revealed in due time.  We can attempt to grasp why things are the way they are and why events must unfold the way they do, but until such time as we reach full enlightenment, it will remain beyond our understanding.  We just have to keep aiming for the light and one day we will reach it.  Then it will all make sense.  We will exist as pure light, in a world beyond sorrow.  Our past sufferings will be distant memories and we will all be together again.

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       P.S. – Dad used to say his own father was so mentally ill as to be basically underwater in a swamp.  As he saw it, he was standing on his dad’s shoulders and had managed to get his head above water.  He said he pictured himself holding his hands up as high as he could, so my brother and I would be entirely out of the swamp.  He saw himself as a casualty of his father’s darkness, but he took comfort in the fact that the two of us could be free from the curse and could do whatever we wanted with our lives.  I think of this like the lotus: a symbol of spiritual purity because it rises miraculously above the mire to become perfect, even while existing in an imperfect world.  I think that's what the smile on young Mark's face really meant.  In a world full of suffering and hatred, where weapons of Armageddon were proliferating out of control, he dared to dream a better future: a world where everyone was happy, healthy, and went out of their way to do nice things for one another.  He was an avatar, a magician, and a sky-walker: he knew that by being positive, he (and we) would find a way to win in the end.  You did a great job, Dad.  Thanks to you, we will win, no matter what the odds.  I cannot thank you enough for all you gave us.  You were an amazing father and grandfather.  We love you always and forever.  Go into the light, Dad.  Until we meet again, be well and know that you are loved.

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       I think it's only fitting that I close with a (slightly-edited) poem that I wrote when I was in fifth grade.  Dad liked it so much that I put it in a frame for him as a Christmas present.  He especially appreciated the last line.  Mom had it on the dresser in Dad’s room for the last two years of his life, along with pictures of the family – and a timeless photo of him in front of the old pickup in the snow, kneeling next to Max and Jones. 

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ICE

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Ice is quick and sneaky because it seems suddenly to appear.  

A forest that seems normal one day may be a glassmaker’s fantasy the next.  

Everything seems in suspended animation or put carefully into a showcase, 

Untouched by human hands.  

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These shiny shards, radiated by the sun’s light, 

Drip gently into the small stream,

Where they are quickly carried away from the silvery winter wonderland

To find more beautiful places.

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