Today I realized this day that caused me pain for all of my life is now a day of celebration. I feel relieved. I feel happy.

And the cat went back to being our pet. ​ and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. ​ These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. Another memory of my father is this: ​ I should explain a little about my father’s background. ​ Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. ​ Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. ​ is breathe the air of the period we live in, ​ I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. ​ Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He was unabashedly silly. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.

At the service, I read the eulogy below, which tried to explain why he was special to so many of us. Writing it was easy, at least in part because he wrote the best bits himself. The hard part was reading it. He laughed at his own jokes and at yours. He made it very easy to love him.