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?