Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Dealing with death

You learn about the deaths of high school classmates and their parents from various places.
Rarely for a blog post based on a New Yorker article as Michael Chabon tells of keeping vigil over his dying father.
Focusing on their bonds over Star Trek, and how he remembers his father.
In the days and months that followed, I tried to find ways to mourn my father. I said Kaddish. I talked about him to my own children. I posted boyhood photos of him to Instagram. But mostly I wrote episodes of “Star Trek: Picard,” through and over which mortality and loss played like musical themes. The truth, I’ve sometimes had the nerve to tell someone who knows how much, in spite of everything, I loved my father, was that I had been grieving his loss since I was twelve years old; it was definitely easier the second time around. When I miss him, I find comfort—just as I did forty-four years ago, when he first left me behind—in his perfect, constant, undiminished presence in my imagination; his voice in my head, anytime I want it; his opinions, his jokes, his enthusiasms and vanities and lies. But sometimes, still, I wake up in the middle of the night, trapped in the broken elevator of insomnia, haunted by the cruelty of mercy and its logic, and by the pleading of the devil in the dark.
At our high school, we did the musical "The Pajama Game" our senior year.
The play's director lost her husband a few days before our performance.
On opening night, she brought a hat that her husband loved to wear. She gave it to Chabon to wear for his character in the show.
It was almost 40 years ago, but the memory came flooding back upon reading his article.

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