After months of events unfolding in such a slow and twisting way, suddenly everything blasted forward in a quick straight line — making arrangements, then finding myself standing on Tuesday night in the funeral home, lined up with my family, greeting old neighbours along with countless people who knew Dad from Veterans Affairs, the bike shop he opened, Canadian Tire (where he worked casually after leaving the shop), the Masons, and the many, many charitable causes he was involved with.
Then yesterday we were back for the funeral itself. Darin, the minister from my mom’s church, led a beautiful service that really drew out the main theme of Dad’s life: social justice. Then his best friend, Rob, gave an incredible speech that was just magic. He conjured Dad for everyone and raised him up to his very best, without puffery or skipping over his difficult final years.
I laughed and cried, and felt such huge gratitude to this old friend for giving us Dad back. What we remember will now be the fulness of him, not his defeat.
Rob also shared a short message from his daughter, Kelley: I’ll miss his humor, his wisdom, and the way he cared about people who were unseen or misunderstood.
I’m crying again. That’s happening a lot.
I didn’t know what visitations and funerals were for, and dreaded going through this experience. Now I understand. It’s an experience for everyone left behind that gives a healing context beyond the emotions of the moment.
In latter years, Dad said he didn’t want to have a funeral because nobody would show up.
He was very wrong.
~
For a while now, I’ve been feeling stuck in my creative life. Every time I had an idea, the wind would go out of my sails and I’d think, “Why bother?”
After this funeral and all the things people said of Dad, I feel filled with purpose and inspired to follow his example.
Of course, in true Dad fashion, the last scene had to be a funny one: We took the small box with his ashes down to Beach Grove, a forest by the shore where he’d always walk his crazy dog, Winston.
We waded out into the muck of a low tide, took the box out of its blue velour bag (the “Crown Royal bag”, as we jokingly called it), only to discover that the box was screwed shut, and none of us had a screwdriver.
If you knew Dad, you’d know that he was always surrounded by a zillion little implements. “Always use the right tool for the job!” he said.
Craig and I dashed home for a screwdriver, then went back to Beach Grove. In so doing, we also felt like there was a better place to do this — in the forest and further down the shore.
So Dad had the last laugh, and as we walked back along the forest path with “magic hour” light streaming through gaps in the leaves, we knew the last piece had fallen perfectly into place.
~
I can’t help feeling that Dad is everywhere now. Whatever materialistic logic might say, in my heart I feel this is just so — that when we laid him in the forest, he became the swaying trees; when we put him in the water, he became the moving waves. When the pale orange moon rose last night, it was his face looking down at us.
Some might say this is psychological compensation, but that doesn’t touch what this feeling is. Anybody who says they know absolutely what causes this life or what does or doesn’t follow after it is talking out of their ass. We all live in a constructed interpretation of this existence, even if we don’t own the story we’re telling. So I consciously choose this feeling about Dad in my heart and mind as my own truth.