

	From the time we are children most of us are told that there is something out there that is bigger than we are, bigger than we can comprehend.  Some of us are sent to Sunday school to learn about it, while others go to Temple, or search within themselves for the answers.  Many of us readily accept the religions that have been passed down to us by our parents.  However, some of us reject them wholeheartedly, denying that there can be nothing beyond knowing in our own personal egocentric universe.  We may adopt one value structure only to later change our minds and value another in its place.  Whatever path we choose, we journey to define a part of ourselves through our own unique perspectives of spirituality.  We search for a light in the dark to lead us out of the shadows and into the sun.

“A cardinal,” my father said when I asked him what his favorite type of bird was.  We sat on the front porch of our house, listening to the rain pound on the tin roof overhead while we smoked our cigarettes together. The gutters brought the rain down, drowning the plants along the edge of the porch.  He looked out into the rain, the sort of stare that seems half searching, half remembering.  He had grown thinner over the past few months, and his clothes hung listlessly from his body. His hair had lessened, sparser than I remembered it, too.  He stared out into the rain still, avoiding eye contact.  I felt alone, afraid, and unable to talk to my father about how much I would miss him because talking about it would only make it more real for both of us.  I hugged him, sat back down, moved my chair a little closer to his, and joined him in gazing out into the falling rain of the June twilight.

	My father passed away in December that year, five days after my twenty-second birthday.  The chemo and radiation had not eased my father’s suffering, but kept him alive a few more months past the doctors’ projections; what the value was when he merely suffered longer I could not define.  What kind of God would do this, I thought to myself.  Alone in the night, I said no prayers.  If God existed, I thought, he had stopped listening to me long ago. 

 	I had not wanted to watch him pass from this life into another one.  So I had not.  I could not watch the life that created me while it ended.  I wanted to remember my father by how he lived and not how he died.  Besides, I knew my father better than they did, better than his family did, and knew Dad would not wish for his only child to be a spectator at his death.  I curled up in a ball in my bed for three days and waited for the news.

	No one even called me. 