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
