Englewood Cliffs, NJ

There was no funeral. He went straight from deathbed to morgue to oven in three days flat, including the mandatory 24-hour postmortem in-hospital waiting period.

No announcement, no obituary, no gathering, no public grieving. no processions, no tributes, no old war stories, no beating of chests nor gnashing of teeth nor ripping of clothes. No need. My mother is making the deliberate point not to tell anyone. If people find out he died, it was not because of anything she did.

It's curious. He accomplished how I would ideally want to go: low impact, little to no notice, as anonymous as possible. One of my ideal scenarios is to just disappear. But it's taking an awful lot of effort to make any of it happen the way I want. My father seems to have hardly put any effort in at all.

It's as if there was little ego involved in his postmortem considerations. As much ego anyone else has while alive, neither legacy nor being remembered seems to have mattered at all to him. Me, I have a long way to go. Even my desire to be low impact and go without notice is eyeballs deep in ego.

When I go, I still have a few indirect or abstract contacts who might catch wind and go, "aw gee, well that's too bad". It might not be so, but it seems to me that there might be people in my father's past who upon hearing the news of his death would go, "who?". He may have been known for his professional standing, not for his social graces.

I've been detaching and distancing from people to lessen attachments. And come to think of it, that's exactly what my father accomplished. He was detached and distant from everyone except his wife, and in the end no one was particularly attached to him except his wife. That couldn't be avoided, he needed her for just about anything that involved . . . living.

At least I know the theory works. If you keep people at a distance long enough, eventually they're not going to be too affected when you die. I don't feel like I lost a father, I don't feel like I lost anything. It's the old cliche of you can't lose something you never had.

Not saying anything bad about him, but his functioning as a father was pretty bare-boned and basic. Otherwise he was just a presence with the nominal social identification of father. Really, Luke's reaction to finding Darth Vader is his father was so unrealistic. Luke should've been like, "So? What do I care? You were never around". Instead he got his panties all in a twist and his hand lopped off. Par for the course, dad.

As for my mother not telling anyone the news, I myself may have already been a leak. I mentioned my brother's initial email to me on fb and I'm "friends" with a cousin on my father's side. She's his niece, daughter of his younger brother who died a long time ago, but they have no relationship whatsoever.

Well, she knows what happened. She's hardly a gossip and I'm not sure to what extent she's in touch with the rest of the family, but if she mentions it to anyone, then everyone on my father's side of the family in Taiwan will know. Maybe there will be shitstorm backlash against my mother, or maybe they'll say, "aw gee, well that's too bad".