My father, Ralph Husted, died at home in the darkness before dawn on August 7, in the middle of a thunderstorm.
People often die at night, for some reason.
They seem to obey their summons or, rather, their invitation when the household is likely to be asleep, when the nodding heads keeping watch in the shadowy stillness are failing at their post. The night my dad died, we were all together, providentially, and were all present at his bedside when he took leave, ebbing away so quietly that we stood transfixed by the almost imperceptible, yet absolute difference between the living and the dead. It is obvious, however, to those who watch that this person, this soul who was ours and not ours, has flown, departed, been called, snatched, summoned, invited, carried to somewhere . The incarnation, by which a human soul is enfleshed in a body, is equally as startling and mysterious when it transforms at the end of life as when it is conceived at the beginning. The incarnation was Dad s beloved dogma and first principle.