I lost my dad unexpectedly last year (cardiac arrest). He was one month from retirement and I miss him dearly. The last conversation we had two days prior was an argument about my weight and general dieting. I will regret that for the rest of my life.
I often think about the good moments. The week before the argument, I had bought him a microcontroller because he wanted to get into battery module development and to volunteer in his home country of Pakistan after retirement.
Since his death, I have been piecing together his life in whatever way I can in fear of losing those memories to the sands of time. Being born in Pakistan in the late 50s there were not too many video cameras around and so that part of his life is sort of locked away in the memories of the relatives who are still alive. Once they are gone, it pains me to realize that those parts of him are gone forever. One thing I have done is old b&w photos were "colorized" and that helps provide a small vision of his early days. Note taking in a timeline fashion has been helpful.
Furthermore it is interesting to see how many relatives have come forward with personal stories that they never shared in the past. It painted a side of my father that I never knew...because the moment to ask those specific questions never came up. Still, I am glad the stories were told to me. I am now trying to do the same for my mother while she is still around but she is so camera shy that I am finding it difficult to do a direct interview. I have settled on making notes and taking lots of candid photos so I have something.
This is a cliche, but it’s true; we live on through the ripples of our actions. Some part of reality remembers every subtle thing we were through cause and effect, no matter how scattered those effects.
Consciousness is also extremely strange. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of not just experiencing the totality of your father, but also the entire conscious universe in some bizarre and unfathomable way in the end. The fact that this idea is so common cross culturally and throughout history is quite strange. As are the similarities in near death experiences.
Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us. Who knows how deep that goes. Our science is a powerful means of bypassing our ability to deceive ourselves, but it is forever limited by that same deceptive perception it attempts to bypass. What lies outside our perception is a great mystery, and I think it’s arrogant to rule out an angle of reality not accessible to the materialist conscious angle we perceive so sharply. The fact that it is far more prudent to walk where we can see instead of where we can’t doesn’t mean there is no world beyond our vision.
I often think about the good moments. The week before the argument, I had bought him a microcontroller because he wanted to get into battery module development and to volunteer in his home country of Pakistan after retirement.
Since his death, I have been piecing together his life in whatever way I can in fear of losing those memories to the sands of time. Being born in Pakistan in the late 50s there were not too many video cameras around and so that part of his life is sort of locked away in the memories of the relatives who are still alive. Once they are gone, it pains me to realize that those parts of him are gone forever. One thing I have done is old b&w photos were "colorized" and that helps provide a small vision of his early days. Note taking in a timeline fashion has been helpful.
Furthermore it is interesting to see how many relatives have come forward with personal stories that they never shared in the past. It painted a side of my father that I never knew...because the moment to ask those specific questions never came up. Still, I am glad the stories were told to me. I am now trying to do the same for my mother while she is still around but she is so camera shy that I am finding it difficult to do a direct interview. I have settled on making notes and taking lots of candid photos so I have something.