![]() ![]() My mother’s oldest sister met my father at an Ásatrú Free Assembly gathering in Berkeley, California, in the early 1980s. ![]() It was only once he was dead, and really gone, that the weight of my early childhood - carried for three decades - seeped out through a hole in my psyche, a burial in reverse. “What if he comes to get me?” I asked my aunt on the phone. The second was a postcard, saying “hello what’s up never hear from you.” Just hello. She’d let him know I lost my job and needed money to help pay for health insurance. The first was, strangely, a printed-out email exchange he’d had with his sister. Other signs of my post-traumatic stress disorder had begun a few weeks before, when I received two pieces of mail from him out of the blue. The nightmares about him springing back upright, straight out of bed, started shortly thereafter. ![]() He didn’t believe in medical intervention. Because he’d always maintained that anyone with a disability, or in a coma, should have been “put through the shredder,” the decision to pull the plug, in the end, was actually his. The machines did all the work after that. He lasted a few days on life support, but the understanding was that the initial infarction did him in. ![]() “I think it was ‘lights out,’” one of his relatives explained after the burial. My father collapsed in his own backyard in the early spring of 2019, all 6 feet 5 inches of him, struck down in a thunderbolt of cardiac arrest. ![]()
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