{"id":13248,"date":"2015-04-09T09:21:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T14:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=13248"},"modified":"2015-04-09T09:21:46","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T14:21:46","slug":"my-dads-obituary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=13248","title":{"rendered":"My Dad&#8217;s Obituary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>I began writing this a week ago. Might as well post it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>To wrap up the last little bit of my Mother&#8217;s estate I was advised by our attorney that he needed two items that would prove that my Father had died. I had neither his death certificate or his obituary.<\/p>\n<p>Dad died 28 years ago just shy of his sixty-second birthday. That period of time was something of a bookend to the times I&#8217;m in now. We had just purchased a new home on 21st Ave East and moved in when my Father was failing and had no way to come up and take a look at it. I rented a VHS camcorder and had the family walk around our soon-to-be new home that summer so we could give him a video tour. VHS tapes have about a twenty year life and I haven&#8217;t seen that one since we made it. I wonder if it still exists?<\/p>\n<p>At the same time I was trying to recover from having lost my third teaching job. That was a trifecta, lost job, dying father, new house. Two years ago, I was interviewed by the Trib&#8217;s education reporter as part of her coverage of the 2013 school board election and reflected on that time. I brought myself to tears thinking about the time, just before his passing, that my Dad told me he thought I had a will to fail. God, I hated to see him die thinking his oldest son was a failure. <\/p>\n<p>I put in a call to Blue Earth County to ask that they send me the death certificate &#8211; cost $13, and the Mankato Public Library asking that their reference desk send me a copy of my father&#8217;s obituary. I had a bit of trouble understanding the librarian but I left the conversation fairly certain that they would email me the obituary, now on microfilm.<\/p>\n<p>As I lay in bed this morning stewing about how to write the next Martyrdom (MAJ) column I got thinking back on the obituary I was trying to retrieve. I am a collector of such things and I didn&#8217;t seem to have it. That got me wondering if it had ever been written. I would have been the likely writer but I couldn&#8217;t recall writing it even though I was in Mankato at the time of my Father&#8217;s death.<\/p>\n<p>I do have a vivid memory of writing a funeral oration for my Dad. The year before my Father had written a memory of his Mother&#8217;s life for her memorial service. I wanted to do something similar. I think I referred to that in a recent post, my staying up late cranking it out on a Mac Computer in the College&#8217;s library only to have the computer crash at about ten O&#8217;Clock as the library closed. But I don&#8217;t remember writing an  obituary.<\/p>\n<p>At my parent&#8217;s grave site last weekend I offered a similar but extemporaneous eulogy for my Mother. I had been thinking about what to say for a couple days. It contained many elements of things I&#8217;ve posted over the past years. The chief job was mentally editing it down to about twenty minutes and not missing any of the key junctures in her life that I thought her small circle of friends might like to know about. I told them I&#8217;m thinking about putting a small book of her life anecdotes and art work. That would be a more fulsome project. But what about Dad&#8217;s obituary?<\/p>\n<p><em>I wrote more but this as good a place to end as any for now.<br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I began writing this a week ago. Might as well post it. To wrap up the last little bit of my Mother&#8217;s estate I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13248"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13248"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13260,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13248\/revisions\/13260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}