The muscular strength that it gave to my jaw

I went to pay the paper bill the other day. The shopkeeper consulted rows of perforated pink delivery slips; both she and I were surprised to discover it was nearly six months since my last visit. I muttered something about ‘a busy period’ and paid the bill.

Later I remembered that the same period had passed since this blog was updated.

Death has a way of knocking time out of its daily orbit. This time, the shift began on Valentine’s Day, when my father went into hospital for a check-up. By the evening he had become an in-patient; he passed away a few weeks later. In the intervening period, every day contained a multitude of dramas. He was elderly and had been struggling with chronic disease, but in life the precise details of a story’s end cannot be known, and so death always comes as a surprise.

This blog is dedicated to work-in-progress, not personal life, but sometimes progress cannot be resumed until we do something to note, in public, the shift in life’s orbit.

Father was a sharp-witted, well read man who – much to his later regret – dropped out of a PhD and teaching job at Rutgers University to support a growing family. Even in unpromising conditions the learning instinct remained. Sorting out the personal effects left behind, we found the letter of appointment from the university, a treasured document. A box of photographs included one of a man in his prime, standing at the blackboard, delivering a lecture to his staff.

At the memorial gathering I recalled standing in the kitchen – a young woman trying to hold her own – while father challenged me to defend my views and come up with clear arguments, clearly put. It reminded me of Lewis Carroll’s verse: ‘In my youth […] I took to the law and argued each case with my wife. And the muscular strength that it gave to my jaw has lasted the rest of my life.’