My Dad Died Last Night ...

He had been in the process of dying for a long time. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years back. He became incontinent and unable to care for himself over three years ago. I guess his body's reluctance to quit was a testament to the cardiac surgeons who performed his second open-heart surgery in spring of 1995, while I was finishing up at the University of Nevada, Reno.



Allan Murphy was a hard man to get to know, at least for me. There was so much water under the bridge of his life before I ever arrived on the scene. My Dad was 43 when I was born. In my earliest memories of him, and my mother, they always had gray or white hair.

Sherman Alexie is a Northwest literary celebrity. In typical Indian fashion he stole someone else's thunder by having a voiceover at the end of his film, Smoke Signals, where the lead character reads a phenomenal poem about dads. I think I'll borrow from that much better poet, Dick Lourie, now:

How do we forgive our fathers?
Maybe in a dream …

Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage,
or making us nervous because there never seemed
to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our fathers for marrying
or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing or
not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses
of warmth or coldness?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs?
Or in their deaths?
Saying it to them or not saying it?

If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

-— Dick Lourie



-- Mz M.