Kissing the Patriarch Goodbye
The last time I spoke to my father he was dead. It changed my life.
28 min readFeb 8, 2019
It’s been six years, now, since I last spoke to my father. Mid-summer, July 15th, 2014. It was in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he was lying on a gurney at a funeral home — dead as a doornail. To hide the incisions of his autopsy, the back of his head and throat were carefully wrapped…
