Afterthoughts.

I mean that title literally. Like when did it get the connotation of "regret." Because, really, I don't have many. Just thoughts after things. Like I'm writing after my father's funeral. And am now back in Paris. Sun's out, though we just had a proverbial April shower. I've survived the trip back to the place where my strangeness was first sheltered, and even apparently somehow encouraged, and we have buried my father. At least I think so. As T noted shortly after the graveside part of services, it's a little weird to leave with the casket propped up on its strange metallic scaffolding kinda thing. That must have struck him because within the last year I was beside him for the cremation of his grandmother's body. One had the option of watching the cremation happen on a video screen. We didn't take it. But there were reliable witnesses who told us it had happened.

Everything was of course super intense. Intensified, too, by the fact that my father had left each of us, his three children, a letter, sometimes two. Apparently one for my Mom as well. She said the letters to us were better, though. But she might just need to reread hers. Mine left me a little cold when I read it the night after the funeral. I mean it was nice then, too, but didn't do anything like what it did when I read it over T's shoulder the next day on the plane to Paris. When it made me cry, and left me wondering why he couldn't say some of the things in the letter while he was alive. Because I was waiting for him to say something like what he wrote to be read after he'd gone. Maybe it's to keep me hurting. In a good way.

He'd also left a letter to be read at his services. By one of his law partners. Who did so and somehow only choked up at the end. Though he did say, as part of his preface, that he hadn't been able to read it without crying up until then. It's funny to think of my Dad as a drama queen. But he had that side to him. A side my mother referred to as "maudlin" over the course of the days leading up to the funeral. There was that. And lots of other things, too.

One of the things I might be working out here over the next entries won't come as a surprise to you. How can I make my name match up with the kinds of things I've just written? My name, it turns out, when it's not Suzanne or some other avatar, is his. And kindness was something that his "Farewell Address" insisted on several times. With Biblical citations and everything. And kindness, I think, marks some of the tone I found to strike in the entries about Berlin. So there's that link. I'll be working on others. And, who knows, maybe I'll figure out a way to be able to sign the things. Or some interesting way around it that makes sense for me. And for my memories of him. And all he's left me with. Which is a lot. And heavy and interesting and light and spacious. Tender. And a little savage, too.