RIP S.K. Harihareswara

[brainwane]

My father died on Thursday night of a massive heart attack. He'd just had dinner and was washing his hands when he slumped against the wall. He died very quickly in my mother's arms. He was 74.

I'm in India now, alternately engaging with and hiding from the constant flow of people and food and emotion. I saw his corpse yesterday. Tomorrow we'll start going to orphanages and retirement homes to feed people in memory of my dad. That's what he wanted in lieu of the standard prayer rituals.

In the coming weeks and months I expect I'll write a lot about my family. Right now I just wanted to tell you what's up. Your condolences are welcome in comments, emails, or instant messages. But I especially encourage you to comment with happy memories of your own family -- or, if you have none of those or none that you want to share, happy memories of any sort.

(cross-posted from my blog)

Comments

[wired]

I am sorry for your loss, Sumana.

My dad and I were AV geeks together. I ran the wires through the attics, and then we worked together to connect them to whatever new speaker/tuner/stereo had been added to the system. Then we sat down and watched big loud movies to "test the sound". When we first started doing this, it was "Top Gun" on VHS. There was a year it was on laser disc. As soon as DVDs came out, we started using "Hunt for Red October". If you have the 5.1 rear speakers properly configured, you can hear the subs moving behind you, and the rumble of the engines under the couch.

When we started doing this, he taught me to strip wires. The last thing we bought, I helped him configure his wireless minispeaker plug in so the computer could stream podcasts to the kitchen.