The body of my father is gone, but his place is here and occupied by something that cannot just be called memory. It is alive and current. How could the complexities of being, the mechanics of our anatomy, the intelligence of our biology, and the endless firmament of our interiority—the thoughts and questions and yearnings and hopes and hunger and desire and the thousand and one contradictions that inhabit us at any given moment—ever have an ending that could be marked by a date on a calendar? Hasn’t it always seemed that way? Haven’t I always detected the confusion of funerals, the
...more
