The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Today we’re going to my wife’s father’s funeral. She’s been out here in Wisconsin three weeks while he died a lingering and painful demise, probably memories she’ll never erase but hopefully not permanently scarring. I arrived here in Oshkosh a week ago after flying into Madison to visit my 98 year old dad in the assisted living place we put him six months ago, only to walk into his apartment to find him flat out on the floor half dressed, moaning from where he’d fallen. Welcome back!

I’m not accustomed to Death or Dying. Although … I suppose nobody is. Wars maybe. Pandemic hotspots, possibly. Having worked in a hospital as an orderly for ten years, I witnessed plenty of horrors but those were strangers, brief brushes with fellow earthlings leaving their mortal coil, just part of the job, nothing personal, no need to turn it into a philosophic inquiry.

This is different. It feels as if we’re all dying. Which, of course, we are. If we care to view it that way. People like to say — and even believe — a funeral is a kind of Closure. I’ve never understood that word ‘closure’. A door closing behind us, shutting out the past? Turn off the lights, lock the door and leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob?

We’re going to the cemetery where Karen’s mom was buried years ago on a similarly cold bleak and windy November day in Wisconsin, the sky the color of Lake Winnebago, spitting snow over an open grave, soon to be filled back in, grass growing again in spring, all of us back where we came from, back to the business of living.

I’m no longer a philosophic enquirer. Explanations are the faux news of my existence. For those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries, no need for answers. Life, I think, is more like a music, not a riddle. The dead dance with us, the living. They’re never really gone and the door we thought we closed was never really soundproofed.

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