There Ought to be a Name for a Color for That

Drove home tonight at 9:30pm, daughter asleep in the back of the car. And the sky was still lit, darker than turquoise, and bluer but still more green than blue. We come up against things every day that cannot be said, or cannot be said with precision. And we rely on the fabric of our shared humanity, rely on the intuition or wisdom or insight of those around us to interpret what we say.

So cumbersome, words -- and "words" itself sounds so pedestrian, ordinary things like bent 10-penny nails -- perhaps exchangable, more likely not.

The two of us visited my father's grave site earlier today. My 4 year old (soon to be 5) wrestled with the idea that her "Poppy" was under the ground. "Can I dig down and see him?" (No, he's not really down there, only his body.) "But can I see him?" (He wouldn't be Poppy any more if you did.) "Who would he be?" (Indeed.)

I wish I could report at this point that I felt better, that I was coming to terms with his passing... But I'm not. I feel worse. I think more about my own health, my mortality. I am quicker to anger, less inspired to correct the unhealthy habits in my life. If there is a way to attack this, I do not see it. I feel quite passive in the face of it all. And the ephemeral nature of all that I do and have done in the days and years prior... is painful.

This is not right living because it is divorced from action. Something will have to yield. There ought to be a word for this waiting... waiting for something terrible or magnificent, possibly both, for something to rend the veil. Or else not, and I will diminish as my father before me has. The novels unwritten, the promise unfulfilled -- what will my little kindnesses mean against failure on that scale? Will they stack even so high as my transgressions? Or will even that be a matchstick cabin to set beside a matchstick shack? Yes or no.

Normalcy

Sorry for the long break over Memorial Day Weekend, but that really hasn't been what's put me off posting for the last 2 weeks.

The fact is that I'm up against intractable problems here, and doing so from two distinctly different directions. On one side, there are the posts that draw upon my personal pain. They portray the challenges that come with dealing with loss, the anatomy of one psyche coping against the void. On another side, there are the posts that try to abstract from that personal realm into something that might apply beyond me. Something that might strike a chord somewhere in the world.

Neither approach resolves, and my failures here make me feel... diminished. Robert Frost once wrote of "what to make of a diminished thing." And in my own poetry I tried to capture that at times, but not tonight. Tonight, let the thing remain diminished -- because the world is big, and we are small.

Instead let me talk for a little bit about how I come to terms with being a diminished thing -- I don't mean this in a self-derogatory sense. It is our mortal fate, and as such it comes about naturally that we must ask: what is the value of this life? Of my life? Against cosmic timescales and black holes and the births of galaxies?

Several people have spoken to me of feeling my father's presence. I myself have on a few occasions felt his presence very strongly, and yet I know he is not there in any supernatural sense. So how do I account for this?

Beyond the genetic inheritance I carry within me, my father is deeply imprinted in the fabric of my mind. It gathers up the layer upon layer of two dimensional information and three-dimensional memories, and now that he is gone, that information churns and fabricates and constructs him there. And when the mind is freed of the constraints bound to "Dad is gone" -- it re-constitutes him here for me. Just as your minds re-constitute him to varying degrees.

The significance of this, I think, is that it returns us to the fabric of humanity and our impact upon it. The warp and woof of my father continues long after the thread is cut. The community that accrued to him is a fabric that persists and carries forward. The chapter of any individual life is short, but the book is long. And the book requires those chapters, every one of them. The chapters accumulate and influence the narrative going forward. It establishes "normalcy" and creates "inertias" that can never entirely be countermanded or erased.

Now as to why the narrative of Humanity might have any significance... that's a question for a different day.

The Cancer Patient

On the radio today I heard a story about an 11-year old girl with cancer. An interviewer is asking her questions and finally says, "What are those beads you're holding?"

The girl says, "We get a bead for different things we have to do at the hospital."

And the interviewer asks, "What kinds of things? I see that you have different colors."

And the girl answers, "We get a black bead for each day of chemo. A white bead for radiation treatments. A red bead when they take blood. A yellow bead for each day in the hospital. Stuff like that. When you get enough, you can make them into a necklace."

And the interviewer says, "And do you have enough for a necklace?"

And the girl, "I have five necklaces. They're in this box right here, see?"

She asks, See?

It sounds very simple. Look here... Do you see?

How could any feeling human "see" that? I see... something. Through a glass darkly. The vaguest outline, the faintest contours of this innocent child's life.

Do *you* see? Would you put yourself in the shoes of Job's accusers and dare explain that to me? To her?

What is the mode of being to account for this? Where is an answer that could on the one hand comfort her and those who love her; and on the other value this world, this life, as something precious beyond all riches, beyond all wisdom, beyond all ken.

Mode of Being

What are the modes of being conducive to an ethical life?

1 An awareness of our finitude, of our mortality, of our fragmented and limited nature...
2 A sympathy for the humanly inexhaustable finitude of other conscious things...
3 A grounded understanding that the world is real, and real in a way that transcends us, precedes us, and will continue after we are gone
4 An acknowledgement of our fallibility -- of the inaccessible nature of final Truths
5 An acceptance of our vulnerability -- because the world is big, and we are small, we can be and inevitably will be hurt by the world
6 A willingness to interpret and thereby make contingent judgments (an ethics incapable of judging has made itself impotent; just as a theology incapable of ascribing goodness to god has rendered itself pointless)

The foundational premise is that we can only better ourselves by attempting to better the world around us. The Self is a cage, and a terrible cage at that. Unrelenting, morally neutral, inscrutable, self-referentially contextualized and thereby capable of justifying any action. It makes the best of human ideas terrible and ugly. It turns freedom into oppression. It commoditizes altruism. In its rage for reification, it makes us all the same. It turns every conceivable act into expressions of power.

The only possible ethical action must be grounded in the effort to liberate self from Self, and must at the same time acknowledge that you can never succeed, except in the most peripheral, limited, qualified ways. Saying "I am not all" is one such route, a route that extends due libation to Self in the "I" and then takes it away in the negating "not".

Anger

The value of anger is that it asserts the chasm and the dependency between Self and World. Anger is the difference between the World-as-it-is and the World as I would wish it to be.

I have been angry with my father for the past few days... I passed through grief, the "torrent" I referenced in a previous post. Then settled into exhaustion for a while. But on Monday I visited his gravesite and felt angry. The flowers were gone. The headstone is not yet in place. He had only an index card in a plastic holder: Name, date of death -- April 13, 2007.

And I thought to myself that this man never did speak to me as a peer. He tried to protect me -- a man in his forties. Tried to protect me from his doubts, his dark moments, his fears... But all his "protection" did was to put an insurmountable distance between us. He could have said at some point, "I feel that way, too," or "I felt that way at one point, and then this happened..."

I understand that I am and always will be his child... But would it not have been worth more now to establish that commonality with his grown son?

Or perhaps I never did learn to ask him the right questions.

So I feel anger, and that anger makes the world more real to me. It makes the world matter, just a little bit more. It makes my own efforts at understanding, and my own actions in that world relevant. The shared fabric of humanity must indeed be shared. The alternative is a nuclear model of reality that continues to seek a core, an atom of the ineffably physical, never finds it -- atoms to electrons to quarks, etc. -- and is left with dust dissolving to nothing.

I/not

As I work through questions of ethics and mortality, I believe that the I/not construction is the right place to begin. My previous post lists obstacles in the varied orientations I might attempt to take towards being good in such a way as to conduct myself rightly.

We talked about Self-orientation as being inherently antithetical to our project, enmeshed as it is in narcissism/solipsism and the Ich/es relationshiip.

We looked at the Ich/du relationship as being more promising but ultimately problematic. Losing oneself in a single "other" does not seem broad enough for a variety of reasons.

We looked at orienting ourselves into the world, dissolving self as illusory. But with such a view we lose all notion of accountability and worth beyond the all-worth of the all-world. Why bother to define ethics or right action in such a world view? Why bother to distinguish good from evil?

So we come back to the intuitive "I am not..." I find it apt because it asserts self in the initial "I", then takes it away with the negating "not". It posits a between place, a liminal state between Self and World, neither/and, if you will. World because "not," while negating, also implies a comparison... a comparison to something beyond self. If "I am not X" -- then something else must exist that "is X" because I would not otherwise have any way to conceive or apprehend it.

Let's start from the position of a simple object, a ball: "The ball is red," attempts to capture the ball with language. The noun carries essential qualities with it, "ballness" in this case, the predicate asserts definition. It excludes the many (in this case all elements of the light spectrum that do not fit "red") and includes only the particular. The ball itself is asserted and reaffirmed in the quality assigned to it.

Compare this to "The ball is not green." The noun "ball" is still asserted, but almost immediately erased by the "not" -- the particular is excluded, but the general is left afloat -- vibrant and alive in possibility. We come, upon contemplation, to understand how very little we can say about this ball: its roundness, its condition, and so forth. We can force ourselves to the same line of reasoning via "The ball is red," but "The ball is not green," leads us to it, compels us towards these considerations.

"The ball is not green" requires us to confront our human limitations on epistemological, semiotic, phenomenalogical, and ontological levels. It exposes us to the silence surrounding all the things the ball actually is, might be, or could become. The tie to Job becomes a little clearer to me in this context.

In this context, Brian's position: "I am not all" begins to emerge as a possibility. "I am not infinite." This tack bears much closer examination now.

A second possibility occurs to me, a modification of "I am not good" replaced now with, "I am not worthy..." which doubles the ambiguity, for not only am I asserting that I am *not* X, but this X carries much latency with it. Not worthy of what? It is the statement of a servant or a steward, and such a stance appeals to me as it doubly displaces me from the illusion of a kingly, ruling Self.

Much to consider yet. I hope those tuned in are finding this of some small interest...

Being prepared

As discussion here develops, it becomes increasingly clear to me that our state of being ground ethics. The task is not to catalogue actions (which cannot be catalogued because humanly inexhaustable), nor to try and divine intent behind any given action (which is undivinable -- arguably even for the one who commits the act).

So the question at its essence becomes: "What is (or are) the mode(s) of Being that are conducive to ethical action?"

How do we prepare ourselves to receive the necessary ethical insight, and how do we prepare ourselves to act appropriately with that insight?

The world is unpredictable and vast. Death, still more unpredictable and vast. We are limited, largely (albeit not entirely) predictable, and very small.

I cannot orient towards Self -- which takes me away from the world. Still less, I cannot orient myself towards desire, which is merely Self-ness made manifest. Every want, every perceived need, feeds Self, and commoditizes (and thereby shrinks) World (early commentators referenced Buber and the I/it relationship). One begins to see the wisdom of at least limited fasting...

On the other hand, I cannot fully agree with Levinas, who places the orientation on a quasi-mystical "other" [person]. It's a step in the right direction, because it orients me beyond myself. But while that "other" is certainly humanly inexhaustable, that individual is still only the smallest step towards acknowledging the full scope and scan of the world-in-process. This is the problem of Buber's Ich/du model. As mentioned earlier, I wonder if "I am not all" does not also take us to this place, but I am frankly torn on this issue.

Nor can I resolve it with a Buddhist model of "all is truly one" -- the World is big, and I am small is binary. I merely borrow "the World" to contain my self, conflating the two, treating self as illusory. And yet I act (or choose not to act) in the world, and these actions/non-actions have consequences for my contemporaries and for future generations of humanity. I find it facile and callous to erase the human miseries of War, Oppression, and Corruption; and the "natural" miseries of Aging, Disease, and Death under the rubric of "we are all one."

I admit, I am at an impass here, before argument has really even begun. I will think on this a bit.

Shakespeare and a memory

Shakespeare gets it right:

The Tempest. Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.

Ferdinand answers:

The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

***
"Something rich and strange..."

I have become increasingly tired of late. I think my grief condenses. Where before it was a mist all around, tonight I feel a torrent.

This is the second time he died for me. I haven't mentioned it before. He had a grave heart attack some 30 years ago; we were together -- just him and me -- at the YMCA. He had been playing racquetball or handball. He left in an ambulance, and his last words to me at the time were, "Oh son, you'll have to take care of them all."

I never had to, I should mention before this gets too maudlin. He recovered, or actually, someone else recovered in his body. Because he was never again the man he had been up to the time he entered that ambulance. Not a bad man. In many ways, he became a better man. Gentler, more tolerant, more loving and patient. But not the man I'd thought of as a god.

This is no mortal business. I might say the same of this very strange endeavor I've begun here. Why am I unable to extricate my examination of ethics from the loss of my father, yet at the same time find myself so unable to fuse and bind those disparate themes?

Late night thoughts -- regret

Experience is so inadequate to our ending. We talk about living a life of no regrets, but I think to myself that the person who dies without regret is one who must be lacking all imagination. I consider the paths I have chosen in my own life, and I am for the most part happy with the track of it to this point in time. But without regret? There were a thousand lives I could have lived, and a thousand more I could start living from this moment.

Here and now, enmeshed in my present life, the feeling must be so muted in comparison to the last distilled instant of consciousness. But even now, enmeshed in my present life, there are many, often incompatible, routes I wish I could have pursued. And I would have wanted to pursue all of them, were that scenario at even the vaguest, most distant horizon of the possible.

If I were to finish the books that are half done in manuscript, and the fragments of a novel my father left, and novels friends and family members have periodically said they wish I would write for them, there would still be another novel, shelves of novels unwritten, novels impossible to write were I to want only that for the remainder of my time.

Without regret. I suspect that regret is the closest thing we have to counterbalance our delusions of immortality. I do not mean "immortality" on a grand scale -- "I am a god" or somesuch nonsense -- but rather in the sense that we all fill our days with many trite and silly things. The way we waste time, doing things that are unimportant to us. Those actions are the living flesh of deluded immortality -- the actuality, perhaps even the necessity of our assumption that we will take care of the important things at another time, on another day.

Or perhaps, in that last droplet of consciousness, our perception changes radically enough to erase all regret. I do not know which ending would be worse, or if the answer is the same for every person, or if there is anything one can do to ward it away or invite it -- depending on what one might wish for. Regret or no regret.

Legality and Ethics

There's a lot more ground to cover on the issues of will, intention and desire. But tonight I do want to complete and make explicit a thread of thought I began a few posts back.

Legality and ethics are in opposition. In the example of Abraham, our inability to gauge intent may (I say *may*) render us unable to render an ethical judgment. But where ethics fail, legality steps in and prosecutes. Were Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, a court of law would and should prosecute the act.

Attempts to divine intent would impact the severity of charges faced and the type and length of sentence. Our fictional Abraham (fictional because in this alternative universe, we posit that he actually completes the act of sacrificing his son), acts under a divine imperative, and so might well be performing an ethical act, but acceptance of the legal consequences would be part and parcel of his ethical conviction. In this, he woul be no different from Socrates accepting the legal punishment assigned him.

From parking tickets to charges of murder, the legal system is there as a prosthetic to substitute for ethics when our ethics fail. Over time, I believe, the tendency is for legality to assert larger and larger domains for itself -- moving into contract law, when a handshake once served; arbitration law, when debate once served; and so forth. The scope of ethics shrinks until our culture behaves as if "good/bad" were irrelevant, and "legal/illegal" is the only meaningful distinction.

In this time of legal dominance, this entry appears to be an unmediated criticism of Law because I overlook the obvious advantages that accrue to law. Law at least attempts to apply objective standards towards adjudication of societal rules and values. As such it carries with it a strong democratizing tendency. It asserts that legality should and (because objective) can apply equally to all people.

The world of ethics, on the other hand, carries strong potential for elitism and abuse -- precisely because to some extent in must eschew objectivity. Intent is not tacked onto ethics, it is integral to ethics. And as we've already begun to establish, intent is precisely where the difficulty arises in living the good life or being a good person.

I confess, though, on the whole, I would prefer to live in an era with an excess of ethics, as opposed to the hyper-legalistic era of today.

Doing and Being

A few entries ago, I entered into a meditation on intent and the problems that come with it. I cannot ever know with full confidence the intent of another, and this has the potential of barring me from ethical judgment. An ethics incapable of judging is an ineffectual ethics.

Our individual lives are threads in the tapestry of humanity. We are dependent upon one another. One version of this notion: Aristotle asserts that one cannot be good, cannot live the good life, in a bad community.

Because of this dependence, it is not adequate to develop an ethics that applies only to one's self in isolation. If an ethical system denies us the authority to criticize unethical actions of others, or to praise the ethical acts, it is not an ethical system at all. It fails the first test of ethics, that it be applicable and true to human experience.

And yet, thus far, I have worked on this issue solely from the perspective of ethics as action. Charles Taylor, in his excellent book "Sources of the Self," concisely points out the problem: "This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work,, as the privileged focus of attention or will." (3)

Perhaps focusing on right action is too late in the sequence of cause-and-effect relations to pinpoint ethics. If Taylor is right, the essence of doing right is existing within rightness; doing right is the healthy emanation that results from the proper ontological orientation.

I need to think more on this, but at least on the surface such an approach would explain my earlier questions around why so many who live ethically seem to begin from the premise of "I am not good." Such a statement is rooted in a set of ontological assumptions from which right action might best emanate...

Alice in Wonderland

While my father was still alive, during the year of his cancer, this is what I would recite to myself when I needed to steel or compose myself:

"The ant's a dragon in his centaur world
Pull down thy vanity.
It is not man made courage, nor made order, nor made life,
Pull down!"

It's from Ezra Pound's cantos and has served me well.

Now that my father is gone, the passage I continue to go back to is in Chapter 1 of Alice in Wonderland:

"First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; "for it might end, you know," said Alice to herself; "in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?" And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing."

I was in the room when Dad released his last breath, and this is what I thought to myself. To this moment I find myself continuing to wonder what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out...

Lewis Carrol's use of the word "fancy" fascinates me. At some point, I will have to address the role of imagination in ethics -- as the central panel in the triptych that includes interpretation and empathy.

Fancy, interpretation, empathy. "Fancy" as opposed to "imagination" because the former strikes me as suggesting something less willed, something open to channels beyond our own cause and effect.

Side note: The beginning and end of the Greek alphabet is "alpha" and "omega" -- both are gates to the world. "Alpha" is the barred gate because the alphabet must be learned, but to the Greek mind, Omega is the open portal because through language we reach out to both the physical world and the humanly infinite (that is, the humanly inexhaustable -- only a nihilist could believe in an absolute infinite).

It is a very small and subtle difference, but no accident I think that in English both gates are barred -- "A" and "Z". We use our language to bottle things up, to separate and isolate, to our loss.

Intent

The comment on my last post posited two modes of solipsism, one mechanistic, a malfunction of the brain, the second manufactured, developed, nurtured as a defense against the unyielding world. He asked whether one, both, or neither constituted a core cause of evil.

I agree with him that evil, and good for that matter, are initiated in intent. Without intent, acts can be good or bad; outcomes can be joyous or tragic, but they will need other terms to explain their causes.

As a result, all references to "solipsism" in my previous post should be thought of as "willful solipsism." I hope others who come here will view the comment, because there are several additional insights there well worth considering.

Tonight, however, I want to raise the thorny issues that come with assigning good and evil to intent.

The problem, of course, is that we are often capable of shielding ourselves from our own intentions, and are utterly, irreversibly incapable of truly, wholly discerning the intent of another. The classic formulation of this argument is to examine Abraham at the point where God tells him to sacrifice his son.

Who, looking at Abraham from the outside, could assess his intent -- to honor God? As are all people, he is a closed book to us. Relying on intent also assumes a fundamental human awareness of good and evil. Were Abraham to have killed his son -- who among us would not have condemned this as a heinous act? It is undeniable. From Andrea Yates to Jim Jones to Charles Manson, our history records many who killed and claimed to do so under divine mandate -- and truly we do line up to condemn these individuals.

It is at points like these where the difference between good/evil and legal/illegal can, I believe most clearly be drawn. Ethics is not law, although ethics can be applied to law, I do not think that law can be applied to ethics. In fact, I firmly believe that in may ways law and ethics are in necessary opposition to one another -- that the increasing power of law in our nation is the underlying cause of the apposite deterioration of our ethics.

Virginia Tech and the causes of evil

There is evil in the world, and a viable ethics must account for it. Unlike Dante, I begin my quest for ethics in the ninth circle. Where does evil come from?

I assert that evil, and what good there is in the world, comes from people and only from people. A volcano erupting onto a hapless village is not evil -- it is grave misfortune. A random and terrible event, but a disaster that lacks any intent. Evil is initiated in intent. I should also attempt to define evil at some point, but let's defer that for a later date and begin instead with an investigation into the causes of evil.

There are only three of them, and all are actually aspects of selfishness. It may well be that all might just as easily be subsumed under the heading of "desire" -- but again let's hold off on that hypothesis for the moment.

The three causes of evil:
1) Solipsism -- belief that one is the only real being in the universe -- the ultimate selfishness
2) Greed -- selfish desire for gain in several dimensions: power; wealth; sex dominance; etc.
3) Fear -- self-centered orientation towards self-preservation

But of these three solipsism allows for the biggest breaches of ethics. When school shootings happen, we ask the same tiresome questions about "How could this possibly happen?" We act as if it is difficult to understand. But it is very easy to understand, albeit abhorent. What would murdering another matter if I did not grasp the autonomous reality of that other person? Murdering dozens would be no more significant that grinding a heel into an anthill, or worse, tossing out old mattresses that have outworn their use.

We use terms like "dehumanize" or "desensitize" but in essence, a killer is trained, twisted, and/or psychologically predisposed to deny the full existence of their victims. Those victims are props, furniture to be arranged or discarded. If you are not real, and the world beyond myself is in its entirety is not real, what would your life matter to me? And why would the praise or opprobrium of the world trouble me?

One approach to ethics might be to attempt to act in opposition to the prime causes and intents behind evil. Hence the response to #1 Solipsism might be Awareness of Being in the World, consciousness of the reality of our context beyond our own perception and cognition. In short, the world is real, and the lives of all living things within that world are real.

The response to #2 Greed might be Subsume Desire. The response to #3 Fear: Acceptance of our Human Vulnerability.

I will explore this in more depth on my next blog, but for the moment I would like to point out that this third point leads me back to my father. Because I believe my father was in fact a good man, and the crux of the question for me -- which I do not pretend to have resolved -- is whether good people can ever think themselves to be good.

I do not think my father ever truly thought himself a good man, and yet he was. And I am forced to look back on my personal experience and conclude that I never did meet a person who proclaimed him/herself "good" who adhered to anything that I would call goodness. And often in my life I have encountered people who thought themselves "not good," who I would have held up as models of ethical action.

As human beings, we are capable of powerful self-deceptions, and that self-deception arguably begins at the level of immediate perception, before even the conscious mind is brought to bear.

For the Virginia Tech killer, what comes through to me first is the sense that this boy thought himself unassailably, undeniably right -- as a person with access to a truth that, to him, burned so brightly and clearly, that alternative views were not possible. He compares himself to Jesus. He thinks himself a martyr, despite his inability to articulate a cause worthy of martyrdom beyond the self-importance he assigns to his own impotent rage. He is a pile of ash, burning with self-destruction and self-glorification.

If we do not start from the position of "I am not good," I wonder if there could possibly be any other stance that would allow some critical perspective primal enough to intercept our egos. Is it valid to found an ethics on the premise that "I am not good"?

If so, this approach is gravely in opposition to the mainstream culture of our day, where self-esteem is held and cherished as deeply as any religious mantra.

Part of what I said at his funeral

Funeral Service – Dr. Pete Soteres
Monday, April 16, 2007

My dad would often read and comment on the works that I wrote and published. In most cases, I could predict what he would say: Keep it simple, son.

So in honoring him here, I’m going to try to keep it simple.

There is only one thing I want to say about my father: He died in a way consistent with the way he lived.

He lived respecting all those whose paths he crossed – and he died with dignity and in peace.

He lived loyal and true to his wife, his friends, and his family – and he died surrounded and comforted by their loyalty, compassion, and faith.

He lived dedicated to easing suffering, to healing, to caring for others – he died selflessly and painlessly, and even as he did so he continued to heal and bring comfort to all those who loved him.

And so, for any who think that life and death as things opposed, I would ask today and going forward that you remember my father and with him the lesson that as we live our lives, so shall we die. So live in charity and respect for others and generosity of spirit. Live in joy and in caring and in peace. Live in love and dignity and hope.

Because, due to my father’s example, I do believe that if we can do these things, we shall also die in these things – and be a comfort rather than a burden to those we must one day leave behind.

I’d like to close with a poem my father wrote upon the death of his father:

Gone, gone, gone away
These tragic words I hear today –
My father’s gone, I now must say
And I must look to find where ended
The plot that winds through all his kindred
What would he do?
What has he done?
The stories there as bright as sun.
Pause, Pause, Pause, Reflect,
And out the corner of my eye
I see his loom against the sky.

The weaver’s gone,
But the pattern’s there.
The needle and thread
Are in good repair.

There I’ll grasp them at this row
And now if only I can sow.

It’s in! The stitch is in this day!
Oh Lord, give me the strength to stay!
And keep the needle on its way
Until another comes behind,
And takes from me the tie that binds.

***
Dad, your sons will do our best to keep the stitching straight and continue to weave the pattern you perceived and wrote about almost 30 years ago.

But I’d want to add that the pattern goes beyond the tightly knit bond of father-to-child – it extends to every one of you here. You all carry threads of my father; I hope you all feel as I do, that knowing him made you better people, even as he believed that knowing all of you made him a better man. I’m grateful for that and take comfort knowing that so much of him still resides with us here – in all of you, in the fabric of our common community.

Dad, we are honored to have known you, indebted to your kindness and guidance, and inspired by your example in life and in death. But most of all, we love you and miss you.

Brief biography of my father

Peter Spiros Soteres, M.D., passed away on April 13, 2007. He was born in Dothan, Alabama on July 22, 1939. After attending high school in Dothan, Alabama, Dr. Soteres attended the University of Alabama. He graduated from the University of Alabama College of Medicine and trained at Southwestern Medical School, Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

He served in the USAF as a medical officer at Offut AFB, Nebraska. He completed his training in Pulmonary Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical College and at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Following a brief retirement from his medical practice, Dr. Soteres joined Hospice of Chattanooga where he was a constant support and strong influence for patients, their families and for the staff.

Dr. Soteres was a respected and beloved doctor in Chattanooga for more than 30 years. In that time he treated thousands of patients and was known for his medical expertise, his warm bedside manner, and his attentiveness to those under his care. Beyond his professional excellence, he treated everyone around him – patients, their families, nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff – with respect and compassion, and in doing so touched countless lives and made this world a better place for us all.

Life matters

I will hold to the guidance of my father, who passed away yesterday morning, Friday, April 13, 2007 at 10:05am: Keep it simple, son.

I will try.

Our shared world is a tapestry, and our lives are the threads that shade the world and shape it. This is the whole of what there is or was or will be for humanity.

We are woven, one life to others, and those others to ours. Any one thread may be lovely, but alone it is thin and fragile. There is no heft in it. There is no heft in any solitary life. But bound and woven in with other lives, we find our strength. The beauty of the whole lends weight to the beauty of the threads that make it so.

And so, my thought on ethics and mortality begin. It is one of my ways to try to cope with the passing of my father, a beautiful man who lived a beautiful life, and of understanding why and how his life has mattered. I would like to do this in a way that might help others coping with the loss of loved ones. But that is beyond my control really. Learning to let go of things you can't control is the first and last lesson we learn from watching a loved one die.

Tomorrow: A short biography of my father