The Day After, The Night Before...

Yesterday, we put what I have little option to think of as all that remained of my dad in a big deep hole in the ground. Well, almost anyway - people always come at atheists with the "bleakness" of our worldview, that when people die, they just die. But it's not ever entirely that simple. We celebrate the life that was lived, and we keep the example of the person in our minds, to guide out own actions - and in that way, they DO live on beyond their years of biological life. My dad, as was made abundantly clear by the church full of people yesterday, was a man worth being. As such, he is a man worth missing, and we will. He's also a man worth in many ways - though by no means all ways - emulating, and I intend to try and follow some degree of his example going forward, as I've tried to follow some degree of it before.


I'm not about to talk in depth about my dad here. I've said enough about him. He's alive in all our minds, and through our lives going forward. But that's what we did yesterday.

Today, the day after, has been a day of slightly odd lassitude. Tomorrow, lassitude will play verrrrrry little part in the day...or at least, not in the night. For tomorrow is the Night Hike for Maggie's Cancer Care Centres - d and I get on a bus and schlepp to London for the weekend, and, just for a kick-off, I walk 20 miles around the capital city. Wahay!

I'm going away now for a scandalously early night, back in our own bed at home, leaving my brother here overnight. Tomorrow he goes home to Ireland, and the strange, pleasant bubble of family time we've had during this horribly-motivated phase of Dad's decay folds up and posts itself to different places. Hopefully though, the seeds of reconnection that defeat geography will continue to grow. Fairly sure my Dad would have wanted them to.

Then, when we come home on Monday, I go back in time again, to full-on Disappearing, to perspex boxes and strict, unbending, non-Aristotelian discipline. I want this to happen. One last remnant of yesterday - My brother and I each did a reading for Dad, and a churchful of eyes were on us. When I was 15 stone, I would have been comfortable with that - the Master Suit was big on me, the profile was reasonably flat, the face was slim-ish. Yesterday, I felt none of that. Yesterday it was more like the old, old days, with the two brothers - one like a rake, the other bulging and balding. I'm not happy with that, and it doesn't work as a tribute to my dad either. When he set out to do a thing, it was done. That's going to be the spirit of the Disappearing Man going forward...
...
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...presuming I survive the Night Hike intact...