Alone with Dennis in a quiet back room of the funeral home, seeing my dad for the first time after his death, and him looking exactly right, even wearing a wry little smirk. Oh, Dad.
Then, seeing him on the evening of the visitation, in his smart new tuxedo that he never got a chance to wear when he was alive. Dapper.
Meeting, out in the cold in a mall parking lot, the man who found Dad without a pulse in the backstage bathroom that fateful Friday night. Sensing how troubled he was by the memories and images swirling in his own head.
Watching my mom show such poise and grace and strength as she greeted person after person at the funeral home, and comforting them as they comforted her.
Watching my sons carry the weight of the casket of the man they called Grandpa.
It all feels kinda heavy.
There was another moment. A little background on it first... my dad's only brother, 18 years older than Dad, died just a few months ago. At Uncle Bob's funeral, the pastor's message theme was "Where are you going?" He talked about how often in our lives we ask each other that question, and how different phases of life can define what the answer is. My uncle's answer when he was a young man would have been, "I'm going to Korea," or later in his life, "I'm going fishing at the lake." You get the gist. The pastor then turned the sermon to the bigger spiritual question of "where are you going?," and the soul-examining that should come with that question. It was an excellent sermon.
ok.
The evening my dad died, he was with his swing band at the historic Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis. He had played there before with the band and really liked the venue, which has hosted such greats as Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. I had never been to the Casa Loma, and I wanted to see where my dad was the night he died. On Sunday afternoon we had a lull in activity, so five of us -- Dennis and the boys, and my sister and I -- went for a drive to the ballroom. There was nothing going on, and the place was locked up, but we pressed our noses against the windows, read a plaque about the ballroom's history, and perused tacked-up posters for upcoming shows, and then Trevor noticed something interesting painted on the sidewalk just outside the front entrance:
It was one of those moments of significance and synchronicity. The meandering arrow coincidentally pointed the exact direction that the ambulance would have taken my dad to the hospital just a few blocks from the ballroom, but we knew by the time the EMTs had arrived, my dad was already gone. The great comfort is that Dad was a man of faith and he knew where he was going, and as we stood for an awkward moment and stared at the oddity of this sidewalk paint, we also knew where he had gone.
The 14th chapter of the gospel of John has been a comfort. Jesus: "Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going."
