On Monday, May 2nd, 2011, at about 22.05, my father left this world after four weeks on Intensive Care.
Only some weeks before, on March 24, 2011, he had turned 77. Apart from some minor troubles normal for a man his age, he was a healthy person. Not a week before being admitted to the hospital, he went with my mom to the annual dinner event of his old Institut Technique Ath schoolmates, and was by all accounts the healthiest and fittest of the group. Four days later he was on Intensive Care. Four weeks after that he was dead.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." ~ Psalm 23:4 ~
I went with my mom, 85 now, to the cemetery this afternoon. Since she's having major troubles with her back, right hip and right knee, it fell to me to clean pa's gravestone. I was grateful that we interred him the way he always insisted was the right one: in a coffin, under a sculpted granite slab, with a cross and a headstone. Like me, he abhorred cremation and putting away the ashes in an urn. Or worse: these days they disperse them on a small grassfield for the purpose. Good riddance! Typical for this cursed age of hedonism, broken families, vanity and emptyness. In 2011 it hadn't become mainstream yet, now it is. Dad would have bristled at the practice.
Anyway, because of his insistence on being buried the classical way, my mom, siblings and I have an anchor to get back to, a digified place where his mortal remains rest, having been reclaimed by Earth. Earlier this Spring, I reserved the plot just behind his - and my mom's. I want to be buried near those who gave me Life.
Rest in Peace father. It's been fourteen long years, but we still think of you. God Bless.
MFBB.
