It happened one week after my first Zoom farewell. Dad’s funeral took place today at 10 a.m. Eastern (6 a.m. Alaska time), with a family viewing starting at 9 a.m. My sister-in-law called me via FaceTime so that my niece and I could attend.
In fact, she called at 5:45 a.m. so that we could attend the viewing as well. Obviously itwas painful and jarring to see Dad in his coffin. Yet it was actually an improvement over the last time I’d seen him, unconscious and on a ventilator. He looked the way I expected him to look: recognizable as my father, yet not much like him. There, but not there.
My niece and I were also there, but not there, thanks be to technology. I’m not being sarcastic. It was hard, of course, and we cried, but we also got to be part of this ritual from afar. Funerals aren’t actually for the dead. They’re for the living. The dead don’t much care what you do to them. The grieving survivors, however, need some kind of ceremony to come to terms with the reality in front of them.
It was of course surreal to hear the eulogy from 4,300-plus miles away. And it was heart-wrenching to see family photos displayed: Dad as a kid with his siblings, as a teenager with his brand-new ham radio set, as a high-school senior at the prom with my mother (both of them looking sophisticated yet impossibly young, like children playing dress-up), as a father of young kids (us) and then as a father of adult kids.
Dad with dance friends. Dad standing out in front of his Christmas-tree farm. Dad at his wedding to Priscilla.
And nearby, Dad in his final repose. Watching Priscilla kiss him goodbye and gently tuck a light blanket around him brought me to my knees: I will never see my Dad again in this life.
