My loves. The words that came through as “eulogy” for my father were neither written down nor recorded, so this is a reversed-engineered version of it based on what is remembered. I wish that I could share a video of it with you. He was so alive in my face that day. ✨
The attempt at writing resulted in some Salinger-esque { 😂 } parentheticals within parentheticals [()]] that did not happen when spoken. Trusting a little labyrinth not to hurt.
(The whole piece is obviously bonus, but anything in double brackets [[ ]] is super-duper extra credit.)
🙏
Funeral, New Jersey, October 12, 2022.
My Loves.
As I drove down here from Canada after hearing the news,
The mountains before me in their brightest colors, a phrase kept rising up over them.
“This is what we are doing today.”
And I just want to pause.
to notice
This.
This
Is
What
We
Are doing today.
To our left, the entire past.
To our right, the myriad futures.
And I want to pause
to notice
This is the day that we raise up
David Frank.
This is the day we lift up
Illuminate
his life.
That’s what we get to do today.
And, I want to pause.
Because my Dad,
Was famous.
For pausing.
Whether you knew him as a camp director, a friend, a father,
He delighted
In
The Pause.
To me, his pauses were always pointing to what was beneath and around the words. The Silence that is unsayable.
He was pointing to the pregnancy of the pause.
And as his life went on, especially recently, that pause got longer.
And, I submit, more pregnant.
The longer they got the more Presence they contained.
In my Dad’s Artist Statement he says this:
“Creatures of habit, we move through our days reliant on visual short-hand.
We see so little of what there is to see, and most of that gets dismissed as soon as we put a name to it, subjecting the visual to the tyranny of the verbal.
Close your eyes.
Commit to losing language if only for a moment. Now open your eyes... slowly... as if for the first time.
Look - resist the urge to control by naming what you see. Now look again - like a curious child.
And again.
And again...”
My dad was a philosopher.
He had his own philosophy on art, on marriage + relationships [we all must learn from], on parenting.
Perhaps that is why he championed each of us (his children) to be so much of our own selves with our own philosophies.
We can talk about his unconditional love, though there is something higher than that. His way of reflecting us back to us so precisely said not only that he’d love us unconditionally- no matter who we are. But also precisely and intimately because of who we are.
One example of this begins during a relatively long while in my 20s, a certain way I did Life (or Life did me) when it “dropped all story.” That is, my relationship with the present moment was so primary [[e.g. I told my lover at the time, who, thank G-d I reunited with 15 years later and am now married to, that I was already married. When he looked at me with surprise, I said “to the moment.” (that was far before something like that could’ve been construed as something cool or instagrammable. It was just something odd.)]] I was serious. I followed the moment where it led. One way this “marriage” manifested is if someone asked me how something had gone, even if it had happened a moment before, I’d say brightly, “It totally was!”
[[My experience was that by giving each moment equal weight (equally nothing and everything), I was allowed to live fully and spontaneously within each of them. If I didn’t speak of an event (or a person) that might be deemed more important than others (a speech I was making, a class I was giving, a person I was meeting) as if it were more important, then I’d show up to it like any other moment/person (dear lord, how do we pretend certain people are more important)- relaxed, fully, openly. Not reporting on it afterward either subdued my inner-narrator throughout- You know the one that while something is happening is thinking “This is going so well!” or “I am majorly f-ing up right now.” “This is so important. HANDLE yourself Alice!” “How will I ever achieve anything!” Thoughts that take us out of the present moment. Also, I wished to stay IN the NOW moment without pulling back. It was my truth. It was important to me.]]
Whether any of that was apparent to me dad, I do not know. I never explained it (that would be a story!) What I do know is that he picked up on my way of being.
I would return to my parents’ home from, say, a solo cross-country trip, pilot season, teaching a class, whatever the case may have been, and my dad would greet me at the door, eyes beaming. His 6-year-old golden smile would flash and with equal parts wonder and conspiracy, he’d say, “Was it what it was?”
An ecstatic wave of relaxation that only comes from feeling So Seen would come over me. My smile would match his and I’d say “It totally was!!!”
While all of my cousins were birthing babies and getting married, I seemed to not be doing that at all, nor had I any apparent aspirations to do so. I felt such support from my parents on my path that it never occurred to me that they might have their own personal feelings about this.
Until one year. We were at our huge family reunion surrounded by booming families bouncing children. Multi-generational Glory. I saw my mom and dad sitting stationery on the couch. Witnessing. My stomach sunk. Of COURSE they wanted grandchildren. Of course they felt bereft! What had I been doing?
I went to my dad to address this. I remember being in my cousin’s room, one hand on a post of her 4-post bed. “Dad, I am so sorry.”
“Alice Pie,” he said. He called me that, “I have a daughter who is attempting to change the paradigm of love on the planet. What more could I possibly want.” His succinct inventory of my life, his high-flying perception of my heart’s sole yearning was and still is, stunning.
Similarly, he fully grokked that in relating, the concept of rejection to me was very sad and seemed inaccurate. [[In my uniamory “love philosophy”/experience, the connection that we have with each person precedes our meeting them. Upon meeting we get to listen in to how the uniqueness of that connection might want to manifest. Is the connection asking that we write a screenplay together, have a one-time life-changing conversation, feel annoyance and create a boundary, find a cure for cancer, or, once in awhile, there being a presence of something beyond what words can communicate, choose to express as a kiss… [If our connection were its own animal, I felt like I was not deciding what kind it was, but decoding its DNA.]] I’d approach each connection, wide open to what it wanted to be, ceilingless and curious, and mostly for me, the inclination was other than kissing the person. In that case, I’d let that person know, “It’s not our connection.” On more than a few occasions, my dad would meet someone or I’d speak of a complex situation, my dad would say, “Did you tell them, it’s not the connection?”
He was the purest reflection of unending love. And hilarious.
Turns out, he was safety itself.
Three years ago I attended a workshop to learn about trauma. It was halfway through lockdown, on zoom. I stood very much alone in a room and followed the instructions. “Find two physical objects. One will represent the safest thing on earth- put that to your left. Put the other to your right, representing the Scary Thing.”
I placed a yoga block to my right and to my left. What was the safest thing on earth? Immediately, my Dad was to my left. I felt a moment of skepticism. Really? I checked in. Is that true? I went with it. The instructions were to take the Scary Thing on the right and present it to the left. I did so. I held that yoga block, representing the thing that took my breath away. I presented to the open-wide energy of my invisible dad.
A calm. A softening. An inhale, and an ex.
Worked like a charm.
My dad was an artist. At some point he was a graphic designer (one of my favorite roles for him). The font of his writing was like animated characters. And as he got older it held its same pizzazz but became utterly microscopic. As his spoken words pointed to silence, his actions pointed to stillness, his writing to the margins. His touch too became microscopic somehow, yet pointed to the Tenderness Unseen-
I had one of those once-in-a-lifetime cries. I very uncharacteristically came home and became undone. Each family member held space in my parent's living room as I lay lifeless, exhausted from despair. My awareness felt very far away, my presence hovering above the roof, somehow, my being, anywhere-but-here. Some tiny part of me, though, was held in fascination at a minuscule movement happening on my back. At some point, I could not hold my curiosity at bay any longer. From amidst the ethers my voice came through clear as day, “Could somebody please take a video of whatever dad is doing on my back right now?” When it registered that this was indeed an actual request they did so. He’d been moving his thumb in a microscopic movement, speedily and oh-so-slowly, all up the length of my spine. It was the most tender and patient movement that seemed to say- “As long as this takes. No rush. I will be here.”
There is a brilliance that my dad took leave of his body on Erev Sukkot, a season of Joy- a Jewish holiday, the celebration of impermanence. We leave our big houses. The houses we cultivate, we love to be in, we love in, that give so much comfort. They have all the nooks and crannies, stored memories, entertainment, and luxury. And we go out into the wilderness, into barely a structure, with a wide-open sky.
We go there for every meal and notice, even though we love our home there is nothing not right here that we need. It is not who we are. We are this essence so big it can only be contained in something ceilingless. My dad left his body- his sweetest, cutest, once-comfortable body, and saying- I’m out here. And this is the Joy of things.
That we get to experience those things is Joy. That we are not those things is Joy. That we are eternal is Joy.
And though I hold no one to this Joy today, here it is. Here he is. Filling the Sukkah of my being.
His body stopped working well. If he stood too long, it would fall to the floor. If he sat, he’d lean. We’d be on zoom, where the family joyously congregated every Sunday (the lockdown paradoxically making us so much more present in each other’s lives) and each of us would check in. We’d ask him, how are you Dad. He’d make this impish grin and do a thing very much like this —
Like, “how could I be anything but great?”
My father was a yogi.
On those same calls, during the upheaval of political debate, it was not that he did not care, he had an extremely strong sense of moral justice. But he held already, a presence that contained the opposites. he was already living in the presence that knows no opposites.
My mom took him to the doctor. On top of the physical changes, he barely spoke, (except to make a perfect joke.) The doctor asked how much of his life felt the same as usual to him. “About 95% the same,” my dad reported.
My mom almost threw a shoe at him.
“This is the day that has been made (G-d has made). Have joy and be glad in it.” How appropriate that this comes from the book called “Wisdom of our Fathers.”
Though, as you’ve heard, my father cried all the time (He’d be reading us to sleep when we were little, “First one foot, and then the right, and before you knew it…” and his voice would trail off. He’d be crying, and my sister Emily would take over.) And, I’ve never seen my father cry out of sadness. This is literal. My mom probably has, but though I saw my dad cry often, it was always a welling up of love- his profound love for my mom, his love for us- Jess, Z, Em… It was always and only, recognition of beauty.
PRESENCE:
During Shiva (the prescribed days of mourning after someone exits the body) some of the customs are- we don’t lock the doors, we just enter. We don’t look in mirrors. We sit on floors. (I’ve always enjoyed the similarity between these practices and the things I’m drawn to do entering into a Silent retreat. Looking in a mirror so immediately lets us know that we are a separate entity. Covering the mirrors makes it far more easily forgettable, the fact of the separate body, and so much more easy to dissolve into the Everything.) Now, there are all sorts of ways to interpret these. To me, they are introductions into Oneness that say, “This is where your loved one is. Right Here. Soften your edges, be still and know.” They are practices of Presence. They let us stop for a moment, pretending we are separate.
We are invited into the presence that knows no opposites.
What we enter now, in Shiva, as ways to be connected to him in a formless realm, has always been how it was with my dad and me. Entering a space even after we hadn’t seen each other for a long time was a dropping right into a presence that we never left.
We met in the presence that knows no opposites.
That presence, more timeless and palpable as his life went on, was enough to be with me no matter where I was.
He was as present to me when I was across a border, across the country, or listening silently to NPR together (my whole life) in the car.
There is a part of me that knows I should be disintegrating into a puddle right now.
I would like to submit, it is not my fault.
Icannot help it. I cannot help but feel him here all around us. In and as the equanimity of my own being. My own impish grin.
I submit that I could not have loved my father more.
And I submit that It is not my fault that the grief has not taken form in feeling bereft.
When somebody is so bursting with purity,
Has distilled themselves into a raindrop of a glistening dew of eternity
When that someone has become as near to you when they are across the world from you as when they are in the car with you
When someone has become unwavering love
Unflickering flame
When with their words, they’ve pointed to the palpable silence, that was somehow only the more pregnant the less he spoke,
And their actions have only pointed to a tenderness that never leaves
It is not my fault that he never leaves.
That his presence and love has been unflinching and unflickering from the moment he’s left his body as any moment before.
That his impish guile shows up using my own face as its dashboard.
My dashboard.
My David-Face.
And i, his Alice Pie.
Back to his artist statement:
“Each one implicitly asks, why do I exist?
Each one is an invitation to participate in a story.
I begin each tale – some fraction of a second of my experience of the world –
and offer you the opportunity to spend years authoring the story’s end.”
A poem sent to me by my cousin Melinda the day he died. It had no punctuation, and I heard it in two ways:
‘sorry your lovely father full of life, now at peace and not in pain, walking with his mother father.
sorry your lovely father full of life now. at peace and not in pain walking. with his mother father.
it was the best summer we had with him and he earned his wings.’
Love you, Papa.