Goodbye, Dad

Exactly a week ago my father passed away. Knowing my father and his generally sound judgement, if the timing of his death was of his own volition, late-November was perhaps an appropriate time to go. The inconsolable drear and darkness of this month can discourage the will to get out of bed let alone live.
Although this had been long expected - with his confinement to a care home for three years succumbing to
the ravages of Parkinson's, two-strokes and dementia - the actual reality of
his passing still hit us like an emotional tsunami.
After the initial week of intense grief and sorrow and the busying around of making official arrangements and finally the funeral service, the sense of
the loss itself is only now starting to penetrate. One could say that the first week
was the early shock phase that involved denial and disbelief combined with confusion and episodic tears but now, after the ceremony and the family and public mourners have gone home, I am alone in the still moments to reflect and quietly mourn his loss and what he meant to me. He was a powerful influence in my life, as most strong fathers tend to be, and although he was absent through much of my childhood and youth, when he was present - he was unmistakeably so. He had a deep, full-timbred baritone voice that could naturally project, and a compact physique that he carried with swift confidence, but more importantly he was so energetic and driven. I think the life he lived was equivalent to several lives all concentrated into one. He was so determined and had so much fire within that he was comparable to a steamroller and it was often easy to feel flattened in his path. He was an impatient man from a very old school Catholic-Depression-era-upbringing who rose to prominence in public life here in Canada by the sheer might of his determination to succeed and his extraordinary self-confidence and focus. I always found him to be hard to live up to and spent years trying to live down to him instead. He felt that I had been given opportunities that he never had and I think he envied me for that. He and I had typical father and son conflicts,and I inherited his stubbornness, which meant that I was unwilling to admit it when he was right.
Even now, as I reflect about my relationship with him, I recognize how strained it was and how I wish that we had both respected each other more. He was a very accomplished man from humble roots who had charisma to burn and a larger-than-life presence. He was a "happy warrior" who maintained his values throughout his career and never compromised where it mattered most. It feels as if a void has opened up. That this world is less one more man of his generation -- a generation which did not eschew self-sacrifice and loyalty.
As we become more time-managed, distracted and coarsened by our lives that are circumscribed by the consumerist ethos of "more still" to placate the shallow needs of our own vanity and when we have slid into this festering hole of non-committal relativism underscored by a mistrust of social institutions, we are left softened at our edges and hollow at our core. To witness the lives of those who reflect a time in which standards existed and when values mattered is almost to be marveling at a museum display.
My father was a product of a simpler time, a time when the world was framed in dualities and not multiplicities. Obviously, significant and progressive changes have happened since then that he wasn't resistant to, and even helped to bring into being, yet for all of this, he was a man of his era and he did not swim easily with the currents that were to follow.
He did not go gently into that good night. He will be missed.