My dad is dead.

With this thought my father has been with me more or less constantly since the beginning of events described in the post and comments below. As his mortal remains are with me now, 8 pounds or so of silty gray ash and ground bits of I don't want to think what sealed in a plastic bag, tucked tidily inside the shiny gold box which temporarily houses these artifacts from the life of a man, this debris, this dust:

Kenneth Cody

Cremation No. 25162

Sarah and myself saw him into the fire on the 19th of this month. Or, more precisely perhaps, we saw his body into the fire. And possibly even more accurately, we saw the box containing his body into the fire. I didn't want to see him, really. By the 19th, he'd been dead for more than two weeks, five of those days in the water. . .

For five days (October 1-5) he was not dead to us but missing.

Hope eroded, of course, as those days unfolded and Jane's Addiction played the same song endlessly in my head:

I had a dad
Big and strong I turned around me, man
I found my daddy gone

- Had a Dad, Nothing's Shocking, 1988 -

This is not the first time I found my father gone, of course.

He was much taller then, and I was much smaller.

But that's another story.