I haven’t been posting here regularly for the past couple of months. The reason is that I have been rather distracted; my father was diagnosed with a fatal illness in April, and passed away this week.<\/p>\n
This isn’t a “how I feel today” kind of blog. (If you want LiveJournal you know where to look.) So I have been rather quiet, rather than describing in detail the unpleasant experience that he and his family have been through recently.<\/p>\n
Penn Jillette has sometimes remarked that during times of stress, people keep doing the same thing that they normally do, only more so.<\/p>\n
My father, Joe, was not a sentimental man. After his diagnosis, Joe expressed this even more strongly. He objected to the sentimentality and the hypocrisy of funeral ceremonies. He pooh-poohed the very concept of “closure”. He did not want eulogies, flowers or services of any kind. I, along with the rest of my family, respect that wish and I am treading carefully here.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, what I normally do is tell stories – I got that in part from Joe. Re-telling a few of his stories, and my stories about him doesn’t seem to me to be crossing into the danger zone of contradicting his wishes – especially if I avoid sentimentality.<\/p>\n
Look for some of these stories to appear here in the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t been posting here regularly for the past couple of months. The reason is that I have been rather distracted; my father was diagnosed with a fatal illness in April, and passed away this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,46],"tags":[53,84],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking","category-my-father-joe","tag-father","tag-oddthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1722,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/1722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}