The Final Act

I think about my dad the most when I am driving. When the windows are down and the sun is up and the music is too loud. I think about him driving, and how my driving is very similar to his. I don’t weave in and out of traffic, I rarely speed more than a reasonable amount, and if the car is not a standard my left foot is almost always on the dashboard. I always roll the windows down, and never use the air conditioning. I always have music or an audio book on and I am forever doing something else. It used to be that I was smoking and looking at the map, but these days, in my old age, it has turned to drinking coffee and checking the GPS. Like him, I prefer a standard shift, but I live in a city of remarkable hills, so it is not always practical to do so. I think about him most when I am driving because in my 30 years with him, I spent most of that time in the car. We were always going somewhere. To the store, to the park, to the beach, to family’s houses, friend's houses. My dad was rarely idle, and when he was it was usually because there was traffic on his way to somewhere else.

The trip from Maryland to the gulf coast of Florida is 22 hours and almost every year we drove it straight through, fueled by bad coffee, junk food, bottled water, and the promise of white sands, and water the color that I think dreams must be made of. We played the license plate game, always hoping to collect all 50. Always toting along huge binders of CDs and rented audio books from the library. We introduced each other to great music, and listened to some excellent stories. We chain smoked cigarettes, and talked about nothing in particular. I find myself doing the same thing on road trips now. Walking into gas stations and buying 12-packs of, dare I admit, full sugar soda, and trail mix. I still check to make sure there are no peanuts in everything I buy. I load a cooler full of ice and sodas, snacks, and sandwiches, and put my playlist on shuffle. I switch to an audiobook when I hit a predetermined landmark, and switch back to music at the next one. I rewind my favorite parts of songs, and listen again and again and again. I rewind the books when I hear something profound, dwelling on the how massive the implications of a single sentence can be. This is the way road rips go with me. The same way they went with him.

Forever doing the pee-pee dance in the driver seat because I thought I could make it 20 more miles when I most definitely could not. Playing air guitar for so long and with such vigor that I often have a bruise on my thigh from strumming. I stick my arm out to my passenger when I need to take off my sweater, but most importantly, I am always exceedingly nice to the folks working in toll booths, gas stations, fast food restaurants, and rest areas. I don’t drive the same roads he did anymore. I have taken his gift of the perfect road trip to a different coast. A coast where it is the North that smells of salt and pine, and the south that smells of metropolis. Sometimes when the sun is setting, and I am on I-5 heading back to my beloved Seattle, I think of the thrill of being on 95 and seeing the Washington Monument, stretching it’s solitary being towards the sky, taken for granted, until the day when the swamp beneath it swallows it whole, and those of us who have it in the background of our photographs, will always look for it, even though we know it isn’t there.. the Columbia tower in my own city gives me the same rush. It tells me, in a soft voice, that always comes like a whisper, delivered gently, from just behind you, that it’s not far now, you’re almost home.

This experience, this sharing of memories, and carrying on of a legacy gives way to another thing I love. A thing I have found much comfort in this past year. So today, I want to talk to you as a science enthusiast, as well as a daughter now robbed of a father. That may seem like a strange thing to do, especially here, in this land of religion where we lay my father to rest, but I promise you it is appropriate. In the months after his death, I found myself so very bitter, and envious. Envious that there are those here who have the comfort of a belief in God. A belief in an afterlife, in a heaven, in reincarnation, in something a little less final. I do not share these beliefs, but I understand now, more than I ever have, why they exist. The death of a person so treasured is never a simple thing to bear, but it can be easier to carry the weight of it, if you believe you have the opportunity to see them again, in some distant and abstract paradise. But as I hold no such belief, I grew resentful. Until a friend reminded me of the first law of Thermodynamics:

No energy is ever created in the universe, and thus no energy is ever destroyed. It is merely organized and reorganized thusly.

The energy that breathed into to my father all that we loved was not destroyed with the ending of his life, it was merely transferred back to the universe, a debt taken out before he was born, and paid back in full. All his energy, every atom, every smile, every molecule, every laugh, remains here. In the grand scheme of the universe although my father’s life was often troubled, he gave back everything he got. All the photons that ever touched his face, his hands, his eyes, who’s paths were interrupted by his corporeal presence, were altered, and never to be the same. They bounced off his moments of joy and sorrow, and went back into the world to continue their purposes, as we all have done, or at least tried to do, as well.

I read recently that if one were to take our genetic material, and spread it out in a straight line, we could circle the entire solar system twice. We are not small, we are not insignificant, we are just expertly organized, made of stardust, and minerals, energy, and atoms, the same things that forged our universe. Not a single bit of my father, forged of sun and stars, moon and rock, is gone. He has just returned to chaos, a life, not ended, just a little less orderly… Which in all fairness, seems to be suited for him.