My son and I took a road trip to visit the home I grew up in this past weekend for a celebration with family. My youngest sister is due to deliver her first child, and she and her husband recently moved back to my home town to have more support in place.
Over a year after the loss of my father, it was a welcome opportunity to create shared memories around something other than grief.
She asked if I had any advice for what lay ahead, to which I replied with the memorable sentence penned by Fred Schwed 85 years ago in his tongue-in-cheek finance book, Where Are the Customers' Yachts?
There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by words or pictures.
She appreciated the sentiment.
One moment during the visit caught me off guard. I was walking through the garden and noticed a favorite plum tree had died. The branches were brittle, and there were visible piles of termite-created wood pellets on sections of the trunk.
Dad had planted this tree twenty years ago, successfully grafting branches of apricots and pluots onto it so that a single tree produced three different kinds of fruit.
It was a point of pride for him as a card-carrying member of the California Tropical Fruit Grower's Association (yes, that's a thing). Trying to recapture some of his childhood in Cuba, dad cultivated mango, cherimoya, guava, papaya, white zapote, Mission fig, apricot, orange, lemon, Beverly Hills apple, and citron.
Seeing one more reminder of him return to dust hurt a little.
Entropy and enthalpy, maximum randomness and minimum energy, were assaulting the tangible triggers for my memories.
There is no remedy.
I once heard a provocative play, conversation between alien beings regarding a visit to earth, where the speakers expressed dismay that humans were "made of meat," as if to exist in such a fallible material form were an affront.
Occasionally it feels that way, like a fatal flaw in the code. My wife likes to trot out the best definition she's heard for aging: accepting conditions that one would have previously deemed unacceptable.
As I begin to experience my own betrayals of the body, and resign myself to the constraints of the coming years, I try (not always successfully) to frame them with gratitude - for the parents I lucked out to have, the comforts of my life that surpass those of kings in prior generations, and the new lives that arrive to take the place of those that fade.