May 1999

I now live in the aftermath of my Greek experience, watching as it continues to ripple through my life. Recently I moved from Colorado to New Mexico where I now write in an old home built by my grandfather, much of which he constructed from discarded bomb boxes from World War II. I've decided against returning to engineering and just finished a novel set in ancient Greece. I'm drawn ever deeper into a world two thousand years gone. I feel as if while in Delphi I fell into that abyss.

My father passed away May 12, 1999. My sister-in-law called to tell me, my brother too sad to talk. Our father had been progressively deteriorating the last two years, suffering from the bone marrow disease myelophybrosis. The week before, he'd fallen in the morning while trying to get up from the kitchen table and broken three ribs. Or at least he believed he'd broken them. As I learned later, he never went to the doctor.

I'd called him that Sunday to see how he was doing and talked to him a while. He sounded well enough, but made some curious comment just before we hung up about this being "the end," as he was apt to do the preceding months. Yet this comment was more final somehow, though none of us thought his time had come. I couldn't quite make out his last words. His voice was raspy and weak over the phone.

The next morning, I received a call from my brother saying that our father was in the hospital. He'd gone in on emergency not long after talking to me and was really in trouble. His blood pressure had dropped precipitously, blood-sugar 9, lower than anyone had ever heard of for a living human being. His body was filled with infection.

A little later, my uncle called to say he'd gone into a coma. The word "coma" sent a flash of fear through me. Never had I heard the word applied to a member of my family. I thought about trying to get a plane flight home, but later that day he stabilized and began to improve. They sent my mother home for the night.

But she received a call at four in the morning saying he'd taken another turn for the worse. His kidneys had failed. He lapsed into another coma and died at one in the afternoon.

I'd wanted to be there when he went. I'd fanaticized about how I would hold his hand and tell him how much I loved him. My words would be the last he'd hear. But I was 1,700 miles away in Carlsbad. My brother was the one who held his hand, felt his life falter and slip away.

I caught a plane for California, and the morning of the viewing, I went to my arthritic aunt's home and helped her negotiate the few blocks in her motorized wheelchair. She'd been the only one he'd told he loved before he died, and she'd told him that she appreciated him saying that. She'd not known. He'd been more of a father to her than a brother, she said, as he'd been to everyone.

We had to enter the funeral home by a side door into the casket room, and when it opened light spilled onto the grieving family members inside: my mother, brothers, sisters-in-law, my nieces and nephews and their kids. The door slammed quenching the light and enveloping us in darkness. I was immediately overcome by grief and slumped onto a bench. After I recovered a little, I went to the casket where my mother was crying softly and rubbing him her hands.

A silent prayer gushed from me unbidden. I couldn't quit thanking God for giving him to me as my father. Over and over I gave thanks. But I never saw his face. He had a glow about him there in the dim light, and his hidden features suddenly showed through. I looked into the face of an angel.

We held the service at the cemetery, the spring winds bowing trees, grass bright green with new growth. The Masons, whose order was founded by ancient stone cutters, conducted the ceremony, him having achieved the 32 Degree and the Scottish Rite. I found the ritual surprisingly meaningful, lots of words about sacrifice and everlasting life symbolized by the lamb skin and evergreen wreath draped over his casket. The words were so familiar that it startled me. It was as if they'd come from the Mysteries at Eleusis.

That night back at home, I sorted through the few books my father kept until I found the only one connected with the Masons, titled, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, by Albert Pike, Grand Commander 1859-1891. I opened it and thumbed through a few pages and there it was:

Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries, it is so only in this qualified sense: that it represents but an imperfect image of their brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur....

My father had tried to get me into the Order years before while I was in high school, but as with so much he tried to pass along, I rejected it. We all have our own paths to truth. Our life together on this planet had been a series of near misses. We had skirted both tragedy and communion, and it wasn't until I attended his funeral that I finally came to realize the full connection between us, how we'd traveled similar paths. I had studied the ancient Mysteries; but as a farmer, a man of the earth, and a Mason, he'd lived them.

In August my mother came to visit me in Carlsbad. One evening as she was about to go to bed, there in the old home built by her father and mother, she told me that not long before my father died, his mother came to him in a dream. He tried to tell my mother what his mother had said but broke down and just couldn't. Later he went to see his sister, my invalid aunt whom I'd assisted in her wheel chair, and tried to tell her, but couldn't then either.

And that's where it stood at the time he died, this saddest of all sad things still weighing on him with no way to let it out, and leaving us with nothing but our own speculation. My mother said she thought probably his mother had told him that he would be with her soon, but somehow I can't believe that was the central issue. I imagine something more ominous, as is my nature. At any rate, God evidentially didn't want the content of the dream told but left a mystery. I'll not divulge even my own private thoughts on the subject since, if I was to be right, I would be revealing that which God has deemed unspeakable.