I didn’t go to my grandfather’s funeral. I had excuses at the time — I was living 500 miles away, no money for plane fare, other obligations, and so forth — but mostly I suspected that funerals were some kind of superstitious pagan ritual. My grandfather had been very much a part of my life and I saw no reason to break that thread.
I saw him the night he died. A dream maybe, but different; an alternative, but perfectly natural, state of presence. He was in the dining room of his house in Rutherford, New Jersey. (Actually, it wasn’t the dining room anymore but we still called it that. My generation alone had gone through several dozen holiday turkeys there. In later years, he moved the table out and put in a bed; his bedroom had been on the second floor and a few heart attacks had given him a careful respect for stairs.) He was sitting up in his bed that night. A reading light lit just the head of the bed and I was standing next to it, in the dark. “Tell your mother everything’s all right,” he said to me. That was all. Nothing strange, or eerie — just a simple, normal request made without ulterior explanations.
