The Interval

Here's my attempt below (abridged & adapted from my memoir, In Search of My Father):

It was a dark and stormy night: an awful beginning to a story, it was said - but how about for an end?

Thursday March 26th 1987 was the night my father’s story ended. We had been visiting the hospital daily, and we knew that Dad was failing - but even so, his final hours took us by surprise. Mum had come home, having been told he was weak, but stable - she should get some sleep. She’d only been home for an hour, when the urgent call came, summoning her back to my father’s side. My uncle sped her back to the hospital, driving through appalling conditions, but to no avail; Dad passed away 15 minutes before the Mum was able to get back to his bedside.

My sister was asleep in bed. When the telephone rang, I knew what news my uncle would impart. Somehow, I knew - even before he told me - that my father had died alone.

Well, we all die alone. Kazantzakis had put it simply, but brilliantly: 'We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life.'

We could each rage against the dying of that luminous life - as Dylan Thomas would have us do. And I did, that night - by God, I did - as I stood on the doorstep of our home, a threshold that never more my father would cross. I raised my fist heavenward, and cried and cursed and wept bitter tears in the rain.

But of what avail was my raging? There was a better choice, I knew; and a finer and nobler way to honour my father. Leave the abyss to attend to itself - choose to celebrate the luminous interval instead.