We come and go, but the story goes on

My father died last month. Of course, it's affected Christmas this year but not in ways I entirely expected. Yes, we all know about the great American buying compulsion and false holiday sentiment. I never tire of quoting P.G. Wodehouse's great bit of realism: "It was December and another Christmas was at our throats." But what is all that to the even greater realism of the Christ child? Or the death of a good man?

To my surprise, my father's death was not all sadness. We miss him and it's true that you need to go through the whole cycle of the year to reach something like acceptance of the loss. But in the weeks before he passed on, in the twists and turns of the medical rat's nest, one day it became clear to me what we would do after he died: We'd take care of one another and meet whatever other responsibilities arose--exactly what my father would have done. In that sense, he'd still be with us. When the inevitable call came, I knew my duties.

Perhaps what surprises me even more is the way his passing has deepened my appreciation of past and future. A hundred generations have come and gone since the Christ child. Perhaps a hundred generations of Jewish life preceded him. We make a grave error if we treat this sacred time as abstract history. It's a family story of the most concrete kind that corrects the mistaken scientific impression of birth and death. All of us come into the world in the middle of an ancient story. There is joy at new arrivals and sorrow at departures.

But without this changing of the guard, we would miss a crucial dimension of what it means to be human.

My father would have been 85 in January, a fair run, which means he was born in 1922, becoming conscious of the world during the Great Depression. He never complained about or romanticized it. No one in my family then had much education, special skills or an important job. I think my father's father found work driving a milk wagon in the early 1930s. To hear my father tell it, he and his five siblings never lacked food. People set up a barter system when there wasn't any money and it seemed to work out fine, not lavish but adequate. Perhaps that was why he liked good food but didn't complain about the bad. As a true Catholic, he didn't mind fermented beverages either.

I never heard my father complain about much of anything, even in his final months. Unlike my own whiny 1960s generation, it just never seemed to occur to him. Until the very end, he badly wanted out of the nursing home. He worked out schemes. One night, he called my daughter and asked her to bring him some money so they he could pay an orderly to slip him out a side door and take him home. The closest he came to an outright complaint was when he turned to my brother after going-back and forth between the nursing home and the hospital and said: "I can't believe all this is happening."

It's only when all that is happening that you become aware of certain things. I can remember my father's grandparents, who were Slovak immigrants from what was then the Austro Hungarian Empire. I have a clear memory of when each of them died. I saw their bodies carried down the front stairs of the house they built and lived in. I've done the math recently; they were born around 1870, which means that if they knew their own grandparents I am personally part of a chain of living memory that goes back to near the beginning of the 19th century, close to 200 years.

We almost never think about this chain of birth and death, at least not in real terms. Every birth and death is of course unique. And every life is quite literally irreproducible. Even a clone will not live through the same experiences as the original person and--we know from experience--that means the clone will not turn out to be the same person at all. We have a vast network of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, not merely generic generations but an unimaginable branching tree of individual lives that links us all up together. Some branches of that tree get broken off, but in essence there's something quite real in all of us that reaches out to the whole human story and beyond.

My father saw his great-granddaughter a couple of times before he died. She turns 1 this month. She won't remember him. But I'll tell her about him. It will help her to know who she is. We come and go in this world, but the story continues into the next.

[Robert Royal is president of the Faith and Reason Institute.]

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