A sharp, swift sword is a very good thing, and it is
bad one! ...just a special note for all the cool emails related to my dad's demise and an
apology for not answering them all sooner.
For those that haven't heard, my dad passed away on June
15 from a sudden and severe stroke. His death was sharp and swift! He was at a meeting on
Tuesday morning and simply collapsed at 9:30am. Within 2 hours, he was gone. Little pain
other than the fear and little time to suffer other than a few brief, semi-conscious
hours. That's was good because strokes too often leave behind a partial survivor, crippled
and suffering for many years.
It was also very bad because the departure was indeed so
sudden. My mom, dad and I (my only brother killed himself in 1980 in a fatal
motorcycle/beer/telephone pole incident) have always been a very close family and, apart
from my loss of weekly phone calls to tell the folks all the cool shit that happened the
previous week, I feel a terrible empathetic loneliness for my mom who nows sits at home so
completely alone. 43 years of sharing almost everything they did whiped completely off
into the blankest blackness, just like that. It makes me think that I would really rather
have never of loved at all, for I never would have cried.
My mom and I are atheists, devote atheists, so death to
us means only that the person has slipped back into the void from which they originally
came. Gone, and gone FOREVER! Therein lies the true pain. No happy reunion later in
someplace called heaven, just gone and gone forever. Why is that, BTW, that theists and
agnostists find it easy enough to accept that they immerged from nowhere and nothingness
at birth, yet they can not accept that that is where they may indeed wind up at death?
Anyways, thanks so much for all the cool emails and
please give me another week or so to full recoup.
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