DAD NEVER BELIEVED in heaven. In fact, he was an agnostic until the age of seventy, when he called me to announce that, unlike all the other old people in his Florida retirement condo who were frightened to die and turning to religion, he was now an atheist. It was one of the few times in fifty years that he’d told me anything personal about himself. Amused and grateful, I said, “Good for you, Dad. Good for you.”
“Here’s your mother,” he replied.
My mother and I were close, especially so. She called me the “light of her life,” a phrase denoting a responsibility far greater than I ever wanted or was able to assume. Her death, marked by Parkinson’s and dementia, was slow and laborious; Dad “went,” as he called it, while eating a tuna sandwich in a Florida hospital. My sister and I visited him there several times before he died. “These nurses are terrific,” he’d say. During one visit, the big TV suspended from the ceiling showed the news of filmmaker Woody Allen’s marriage to his ex-wife’s young adopted daughter. “Big deal,” said Dad, who resembled Woody, especially in the eyeglasses department. “Who cares? Leave the poor schlemiel alone.”
