Memorial

That was a different sort of Memorial Day out in the public sphere, more subdued than the traditional kickoff of summer in years past--even for a holiday officially dedicated to solemn remembrance.  I biked past the empty public pool in our neighborhood, just to confirm that my neighbors have more sense than those oblivious revelers at Lake of the Ozarks. They do. No public bathing here.

But it was a pretty typical Memorial Day in our backyard, with near-90 temperatures making our own little pool inviting, before yet another sudden storm blew in. The grilled burgers and dogs were great, as was the partial family reunion.

I spent much of the morning revisiting old home movies and memorializing my late dad, who passed in the fall of '08. That May, twelve (!) years ago, I sat down with him for a series of meaningful conversations. Yesterday felt like the right time to revisit them. It was a pleasantly-jolting reminder that Faulkner and the old Irish proverb are right: the past isn't dead, it isn't even past.

He reminisced about life on the farm in the '30s, recalling meteor showers and nights sleeping under the stars, and the half-moon "privy" house, and the news of the day that got his attention -- things like the crash of the Hindenburg, the construction of Mount Rushmore and the Golden Gate Bridge, sitdown strikes in Michigan...

Then the conversation turned philosophical, and I had an opportunity to share a remarkable 1882 letter William James sent to his dad when word of Henry Sr.'s impending demise reached his son abroad. Having quite recently lost my mother that spring twelve years ago, the aptness of the letter seemed to me quite striking. Dad knew I did not believe in "the other side" where "dear old Mother" might be waiting, but I wanted him to know I understood why such belief might for some, and possibly for him, be irresistibly compelling.

We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an in harmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part. I stayed here only in obedience to the last telegram, and am waiting now for Harry who knows the exact state of my mind, and who will know yours - to telegraph again what I shall do. Meanwhile, my blessed old Father, I scribble this line (which may reach you though I should come too late), just to tell you how full of the tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last few days been rilled. In that mysterious gulf of the past into which the present soon will fall and go back and back, yours is still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating, so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence.... As for us; we shall live on each in his way, - feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are, for the absence of the parental bosoms as a refuge, but holding fast together in that common sacred memory. We will stand by each other and by Alice, try to transmit the torch in our offspring as you did in us, and when the time comes for being gathered in, I pray we may, if not all, some at least, be as ripe as you. As for myself, I know what trouble I've given you at various times through my peculiarities; and as my own boys grow up, I shall learn more and more of the kind of trial you had to overcome in superintending the development of a creature different from yourself, for whom you felt responsible. I say this merely to show how my sympathy with you is likely to grow much livelier, rather than to fade and not for the sake of regrets. As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I cant say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and ex presses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don t see you again Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM.

We talked -- well, conversed remotely -- a lot this past semester in A&P (the atheism course) about whether belief in a supernatural afterlife is fully compatible with a meaningfully-human life on earth. I'm on the side of those, like Martin Hagglund (This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom), who think not. Or at least not for most of us, and definitely not for me. But a happy reunion surely would solve and justify much.

More to the point for me is the recognition that days like yesterday, days of pleasant memory and grateful memorial, are sufficient justification of our personal finitude. Dad is still alive to me, I still listen to his words and seek his guidance, wondering in countless circumstances and situations what he would do in my place.

Again, the past is not even past.

May 28, 2008: