All of his life my father fought against reality. As has been said in a number of ways in television and film about a number of delusional individuals, my father led a rich fantasy life. Whenever the horrors of reality began to get to him, he had a surefire cure: take a nap. When confronted with truth he would simply shut down and muddle about in his imaginative way pretending nothing at all was wrong. My father was the living embodiment of James Thurber’s “Walter Mitty.”

On November 12th of 2025 my father won his lifelong war against the real world. He spent the last several years with dementia, so really he had de facto beaten reality at its own game before he shuffled off this mortal coil. He had stopped talking and resorted to his favorite activity, which was sleeping. The care facility he had been living in took very good care of him for the entire time he was there, and in that final week he had the company of a hospice group to make sure he was comfortable. Mostly though he just slept. I like to think he was lulled softly to slumber by the gentle pocketa-pocketa-queep of the nearby medical equipment. Whatever the case, he went out exactly as he had lived…. peacefully in his sleep.

I myself have never been a fan of reality, either. As can be guessed at from my writings in this blog I like a fantasy world in which some measure of control can be exercised by the participants therein. It is for that reason that I made zero attempt to be at his bedside when my father died. I hadn’t done that when my mother passed away, either, but that is a tale for another time. My dad no longer knew who I was. Being there to watch him expire would have just been another negative memory, a memory I could live without extremely happily. I had enough going on in my life to not add this heaping bucket of crap into it. I left it to the professionals. I didn’t even make the trip down to California to pick up his ashes. For a minimal fee the funeral home sent me his ashes, a small urn that somewhat matches my mother’s, and all of the legal documentation I would need to prove to anyone nosey enough to ask that he was in fact well and truly dead. I felt a tremendous sense of relief. For a month prior I had been getting updates as his condition had rapidly spiraled downwards. I had kept his sister and brother informed, and my daughter of course knew what was happening. Had I set down to compile a list of people that would have cared to know, it would have been that list and no longer. He was the kind of fellow you met and almost instantly forgot. He was so involved in his fantasy life that he never made any kind of impact with the real people around him. He had been mostly harmless and that was by and large all he had accomplished.

At some point I’ll sit down and devote some serious time to writing a proper recollection of my father. It is going to take some creativity on my part, though. Unlike my mother who was an almost comically outsized personality that burst into every scene like Auntie Mame (but with a monkey on a leash and waving a chainsaw), my father was more or less a potted plant. During their time together they were a formidable team. But it was my mother than generated all of the good stories in our family. My father was just a supporting character in those stories if he appeared at all. This is how life works. Not everyone is the main character in the story, even if the only part of the story they ever have any control over is their own. For every “life of the party” there is there must by necessity be a handful of wallflowers to be the body of the party that the wild child gives life to.

I’ve now lost both the life of the party and the wallflower. True to the reality he fought so hard against my father’s urn is not only noticeably smaller than my mother’s, but his also wobbles. I have a number of fun things I can use to decorate my mom’s urn. Now I need to go out and seek something to dress up my dad’s. Perhaps a small cowboy hat. I wonder how I can come up with a combover for it. I’ll have to think about that.