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

[yatima]

My Dad loves to tell this story about me.

When I was 12, my mother had one of her infrequent but radiantly beautiful bouts of English eccentricity, and announced that we were all going hot air ballooning. It was a perfect weekend. The farmhouse was charming, the pilot was delightful and the great silk canopy floating over the plains at dawn was nothing short of electrifying. We were introduced to hives of bees and learned that honey from different flowers has different flavours.

Of course we went back. It was on our second trip, I think, that I was lying in the back of the Holden Kingswood station wagon Jemima. (I had three siblings, who took up the whole back seat, and this was in the early eighties, long before mandatory car seats or safety or strategic arms limitation treaties or cellphones or satnav or GIS.) I was gazing at the stars, and I noticed that Orion, which had been on our left as we drove down the highway, was now on our right. Orion was always easy to spot because of his belt with the nebula buckle, although he's upside down in the southern hemisphere.

"Dad, you took a wrong turn. We've turned around," I said.

He still brags about his 13 year old and her celestial navigation skills. But it was Dad who taught me about celestial navigation, and Orion, and nebulas. It was Dad who took me to the Sydney Observatory and showed me the moons of Jupiter. It was all Dad.