I originally wrote this last year, several months after my father died (the anniversary of his death just passed). What I didn’t know at the time was that my mother would also die about two months after writing this. It was a helluva year, much of it a blur, alternating between numbness, grief, and respites where I was engrossed in working on the manuscript for my next book. Living in the Twin Cities, the last two months have brought a lot of those feelings back again for better and worse. As I’m sure many others here can tell you, it’s been a really intense time even for those of us whose neighborhoods haven’t been as actively targeted, for those of us who aren’t targets. That said, many of us who are white and citizens have family members who could be targeted, even if they are are also citizens. Those who don’t fit the bill of what this fascist regime envisions for the future of our country. Despite the farcical statements about how the surge has been a targeted operation, anyone with eyes can tell you that’s complete nonsense. They’ve been perfectly happy to look for targets of convenience, profiling anyone who might look Latino or Somali, or Hmong, even when they are at work at Target of all places. Those feelings of grief I experienced last year came rushing back with the very public killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and in sympathy with those whose family members have been snatched up and disappeared into the Whipple building and often quickly whisked away to a camp in Texas before the families even know they’ve been detained. It’s been a crazy time witnessing the best and worst of humanity from one day to the next. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about all that’s happened, but for now I’ll return to the original piece I wrote about my father’s death. I recently lost my father. He died from metastatic bladder cancer, which progressed rapidly. One day, we were told he’d fallen in the middle of the night and couldn’t get up, and that he was in the hospital. I imagined a short stay until he stabilized. Within a few days, we were hearing he was transitioning into “comfort care” (hospice), and we’d better come as soon as possible. In addition to the cancer which we were unaware of, he had also begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s over the last year or so, but other than some aphasia, grasping for words, and some memory lapses here and there, it wasn’t apparent how quickly it was progressing, at least from the remove of living in another state with the busy family life and often hectic schedule which comes with being married to a physician and raising two teenaged daughters. In hindsight and in closer proximity, it was clear his dementia was becoming more pronounced than we realized. After the initial conversations, I’d booked a flight for a few weeks out, when family responsibilities and schedules aligned. When the next call came, we dropped everything and went. We made it in time, in a manner of speaking. He was still conscious and relatively aware, at least for brief periods. What “making it in time” looked like was brief flashes of recognition of who was present, followed by his awareness inexorably drifting back to the soothing nature scenes playing on the television in his hospital room. He’d pretty much lost the ability to speak beyond a few mumbled phrases, mainly in response to his nurses’ questions. But what he lacked in words, he seemed to be trying to make up for in his facial expressions. When he saw my eldest daughter, his eyebrows rose and he seemed to communicate, mainly through his expressions and gestures, “You’ve grown so tall!” After which his focus drifted back to the nature scenes in short order. By the next day, he wasn’t really conscious anymore. We’d gone to dinner with my brother and his family, and then I’d returned to the hospital and sat with my father for several hours as it seemed his time was getting short. I was torn about staying with him that night. I vacillated until about 11:30 before deciding to get some sleep and return early in the morning. As I was getting ready to go the next morning, I got the call that he had just passed. I hadn’t made it in time. In Daoism, death isn’t regarded as an ending, but simply the last visible change in a series of natural transformations. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. Grieving is also a natural part of life. As the book of Zhuangzi acknowledges, we all naturally mourn the loss of a loved one, but it also reminds us that when we reflect on their lives, we realize that we all go through many transformations that follow a natural course, like the seasons. We are born and grow through the Spring of our lives. We reach maturity and our prime physical years in Summer. We reap the rewards of wisdom and experience gained over many years in Autumn, and we enjoy our hard-earned rest in the Winter of our lives when we leave our legacy and prepare for our final transformation back to the formless state we enjoyed before our birth. This isn’t necessarily seen as a leap of faith into the great unknown, but as a return or a homecoming. We have a series of ponds in our neighborhood. I’m not sure if they have always been there or if the creek, which now flows mostly underground, was integrated into the storm drainage system in the area, or used to flow above ground in their place. I walk our dogs around them frequently and stop often, looking for wildlife. Especially for the otters, which took up residence last fall. We spotted a family of four a few times in the waning days of autumn before they seemed to have disappeared over the winter. I’ve spotted at least one of them again this spring. Otherwise, I keep an eye out for the occasional muskrat or mink, blue or green heron, great egret, or painted turtle. From the woods around the ponds, a deer or three, or an owl, either great horned or barred, will sometimes appear. Recently,, I’ve been walking the ponds around sunset when the great egrets have been returning to the island they take up residence on for a few weeks every spring. One evening at sunset I was struck by the silhouette of an empty bench facing the brilliant display of color reflected in the pond and the overwhelming wish that I could sit on that bench with my dad and have just one more conversation. The conversation that so many of us wish we had. The one that we missed out on, whether because we didn’t arrive on time or that we simply didn’t take the initiative to have on countless occasions throughout our lives, or theirs. The one about what mattered most to that person who is now gone. The one that seems like it might somehow fill the hole left in our hearts. Of course it wouldn’t. It is their absence that we feel, and that won’t be filled. And yet, as with so many things in life, their absence also brings them back to us in the form of long-forgotten memories. Somehow, the idea of them becomes more and more vivid after their departure. We inevitably take people for granted when they are still with us. Especially our parents. For as long as we can remember, they’ve always been there, and so naturally a part of us assumes they always will. In a sense, they are, but not in a way we can see, hear, or touch. The Daode Jing says the Dao is invisible, inaudible, and formless. We understand it by observing its patterns and manifestations in the natural world around us and within us. This is also how we attempt to understand the impact of a life when someone we love has returned to the formless, through the patterns and manifestations they’ve left behind in the many lives they touched. My father always loomed large in my consciousness. Both physically and mentally. He was a relatively tall man at six foot three. Only a couple of inches taller than I am, and yet for much of my life, his presence seemed much larger. But by the time we saw him in the hospital, he’d grown gaunt and spare, despite how his long frame filled the length of the bed. He was born in 1940 and grew up in the small towns of the sagebrush and rimrock country of Eastern Oregon, playing basketball and football in high school and hunting deer with my grandfather. On the other hand, I have practically never met a team sport or activity I would participate in. He joined ROTC in high school with an eye on getting out of his small town and seeing the world, joined a fraternity in college, and ended up as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. I grew up skateboarding and listening to punk rock, alienated and aimless. On the surface, we couldn’t have been more different, or at least that’s how I felt growing up. As I’ve aged, and dare I say, matured (a little), I’ve come to see us as more alike than not. Our differences had more to do with the circumstances we grew up in rather than a difference in temperament. We both rebelled in our own ways. He rebelled against small town life and mentalities, and I rebelled against the corporate world he was a part of after the military, and which was all I could see growing up. My image of him from childhood was of a man in a suit going off to catch the BART train to his office in San Francisco, or later driving his sports car off to work in one of the many places we lived. I caught glimpses of his childhood mainly through stories told by my grandmother or aunt, but never really connected with it through him. That said, some of the decisions I made later in my own life, such as working on an organic farm, owed at least a little bit to the knowledge that he grew up in a farming and ranching community and that many generations of my family on both sides had done the same. We both forged our own paths in unexpected ways. He also served as an example in many ways in which I’ve since come to emulate consciously or unconsciously. He was a voracious reader and the consummate lifelong learner. After leaving the corporate world, he re
