The Road from Kermanshah

...The bearings came in colorful dusty boxes with German or English...

...The beautiful yet deathly-yellow-colored hospice nurse asked me how long I'd be there...

...He repeated questions...

...Since the diagnosis in August, we had all become used to seeing Parviz cry...

...That Marjan has been aware is unthinkable, even obscene...

...I remember a story from his army days when a friend took him for lunch to his father's village estate, and the father, a Khan, ordered a feast by his river under the trees which included a whole sheep grilled, and they cut chunks of meat with large knives right from the fire, and ate just like that with their hands, "with a lot of salt, a lot of pepper...

...Perhaps it is a wonderful human characteristic that we can lower our expectations...

...But going beyond such works, The Dialectical Development of Doctrine combines the two themes by proposing a necessary two-way dialectic between theology and the world, a dialectic absolutely essential to the healthy growth and development of both our faith and our understanding of the world, as well as of the culture which we continue to create and will bequeath to our children...

...His friends spent hours trying to cheer him up...

...His breathing did deteriorate during the night, but in the morning I managed to convince Louise to go to work any-way...

...His hearing was the last to go...

...Have you found yourself scheduling your day so you could drink or get high...

...He could still walk a little that Friday morning, and had fallen a couple of times earlier in the week...

...He is rather large...

...Two days later, as my sister and I flew to Los Angeles, I had no set plans to return to Houston...

...The crying was the proof...

...All three adults present always tell the rest of the story accompanied with wild flailing arm motions and gargling drowning sounds, and laughter...

...I'm going to hang out for a while...

...Most days, we played games in the streets or by the fishpond in the back yard, and explored the narrow maze-like alleyways with newfound friends...

...I felt this was the day, but what if he did last for an-other six weeks...

...His low morale was a frequent topic of discussion...

...For some unknown reason, I took to the caring of my uncle like an avid apprentice...

...Why am I writing this story...

...Visit us at www.guesthouse.org Commonweal 25 August 13, 2004...

...But I couldn't really sense the beauty, sitting there, alone, staring at the old car and the pebbles and bits of bagel and bread on the ground...

...Are you, or do you know a clergy or religious experiencing any of the following: • Have you been consistently preoccupied with thinking or getting high...

...There is no time schedule to this business of dying...

...How much an object he becomes does not sink in until you see the body parts moved, manipulated, by the mortuary workers...

...My mother said: "What can he do...

...Sometimes the children had eating contests, often losing to Parviz who would playfully join in, and then we were admonished when the inevitable stomachache arrived...

...And the time Parviz bought two government army-surplus tanks to salvage for parts in a town fifty or so kilometers to the north, tied them together with chains, and rode them down the highway toward Kermanshah, shaking the road with their thunder, until stopped by sirened police cars, asking if he was "going to war...

...I am putting some painkiller under your tongue so you will be more comfort-able...

...That there will be a world after me, that the earth and sun and the stars will rotate and shine, and that people, individuals and societies, friends and relatives or even complete strangers will continue, is no longer intolerable...

...Only last month Parviz had made fun of his older son and me for our long showers...

...He would die, I would help and comfort, and be transformed...

...At noontime, we would go home for lunch, sometimes walking to pick up hot sangak bread at the bakery midway from the house...

...His bed-room had the stale smell of disease and decline...

...Had you not known the person, or loved him, they might well have been struggling, out of breath, with a large sack of grain at the shipyard...

...I theorized, optimistically, that as long as there is joy, even of the minutest nature, life is worth living and preserving...

...in a way he was our captive...

...Yes sweetie, yawn for daddy, stretch for daddy," I say...

...Or the time his truck tipped over in an ice storm and crushed his left arm, which was out the window, and how he finally grabbed a jack and freed himself using his good arm...

...Have you ever wanted to stop but could not...

...It had been like that for some days...

...My mother staying home was trouble enough...

...He was such a large man, even so sick...

...Stick your head out from under...

...My Commonweal 2 2 August 13, 2004 uncle and his family shared a traditional two-story house with my grandparents in a small, just recently paved alley...

...Her exceptionally devoted parents have fashioned their entire lives around caring for her...

...Objects remain...

...By the time I pulled him out of the tub, both of us on our knees, I was out of breath...

...He had started to become confused some time in November...

...The unpleasant childhood memory of my parents' fight becomes the pleasurable memory of a narrative well written, losing the old hold on my mind...

...Though they had a hospital bed with motorized, inclining back, he had refused to use it...

...dovebook...

...The patient is surely going to get worse, losing mental and physical functions gradually...

...It was around this very throw cloth that the lore of the family would be recounted again and again, until both the Pryor Pctteagill Ann Arbor, MI 4 I (17 ISBN 0-9334n 2,n ) I ,5 U.S...

...why was I running...

...I laughed...

...In reality, it was a beautiful Wednesday...

...He had been weeping often since his diagnosis...

...I noticed a middle-aged Middle Eastern-looking couple stepping out of separate Mercedeses, wearing matching jumpers...

...Some days he would volunteer to cook for us the only dish he seemed to know, "something that will make you want to eat your fingers...

...I was thankful...

...Perhaps Marjan's expectations are sufficiently lowered, like those of her parents...

...Louise also clung to something the hospice nurse had said about a patient lasting six weeks in order to see a loved one a final time...

...Some pills dropped, and they rolled down his undershirt, on his thighs, and into the bed's crannies...

...Parviz told my mother, a month or so before his death, that he wished he could live even like that, sick, but knew it was not possible...

...Like many in my family, Parviz was a great raconteur...

...I wanted very much to sit outside away from the house, perhaps in a cafe, and pretend to be on vacation...

...Painfully, even these are then taken, one by one, at which point there is nothing to declare but defeat...

...I had not lined up another job, wanting to take a risk...

...I asked the businesslike but kind-faced men from the funeral home...

...As she held me up by my underarms in front of them, it appears I decided that further release was in order, right on my aunt and uncle...

...It was a small town at the foot of jaggedly muscular mountains in western Iran with sunny summer days and wonderfully cool nights...

...But at first, there is sorrow...

...cubist painting, partly sitting up, turned sideways, with legs bent and upward, in all directions, as if crumpled like a paper bag...

...My stomach contracted...

...I remember these visits vividly...

...They talk to her...

...Commonweal 2 3 August 13, 2004 truths and the embellishments were ingrained...

...him at all...

...She had just come out of the shower, wearing a loose-fitting, flowery caftan-housedress she likes...

...Sitting on the edge of the bed that Friday morning, he held his hand palm up, resting on his thigh, waiting for his pills...

...We all saw his low morale as moral weakness...

...Parviz joon, I am Iraj...

...But, as Friedrich Schleiermacher said, it must open its windows to the world, lest it become irrelevant or even harmful...

...The battle has been lost, as was always clear intellectually, but obscured by love...

...Perhaps I am drawn to death...

...It was difficult to watch...

...Men wearing traditional loose-fitting Kurdish clothes delivered fresh vegetables and fruits and dairy every day on donkey-back from the surrounding villages...

...My mother, having arrived all the way from Tehran on Sunday, for the second time in as many months, sat quietly on a chair listening to Louise, Parviz's wife...

...My uncle and I threw darts at the wooden ceiling beams—how did we get the darts down?—and I would climb up and down the ladder to the inside terrace by the back of the store, where more mysterious equipment was stored—patiently waiting for a child's exploration...

...The men came in two vans, about three hours after I called...

...And so Parviz's lighthearted claim that he could drive blindfolded from Kermanshah to the neighboring mountainous town became my claim that he had already done so...

...That very day I had resigned from a fairly abusive company...

...I could not help remembering all the times we, as children, had excitedly opened boxes of this delicacy which he would bring for us, and the pleasure of stuffing too many into our mouths at one time, hardly able to chew, puffing sugar powder, and having to wait until the heat and saliva melted them all...

...When the hospice had brought it in, he said: "How quickly I have reached this stage...

...The story of when he, in his thirties or forties, had all his teeth pulled because he couldn't stand toothache was rehashed multiple times...

...I have already begun to forget the look and sound of his laughter...

...It was only two blocks from where Parviz and his wife and their two small boys had settled twenty years earlier after immigrating to the United States...

...He was asleep, unshaven, had lost some weight, looking older than his fifty-nine years...

...When my mother and I visited her room, her mother introduced us...

...The kids, who were never ready to sleep, would invariably begin pillow fighting or ganging up on grown-ups, and Parviz joined in as usual, until my grandfather, lying down on his own separate wooden platform bed on the other side of the balcony, would tell us to pipe down and go to sleep...

...Passing through the darkened garage, seeing us all standing around, one facing the gurney, another Parviz's woodworking bench and tools, yet a third looking at his beloved Chevy Blazer, as al-ways meticulously clean, and another facing the empty wall looking at nothing at all, one of the men paused for a moment, looked down, and said gently: "Please don't worry...

...So many of my fondest childhood memories involve him: when he came to Tehran on business and stayed with us, or when we went to Kermanshah for month-long summer holidays...

...the hard part was over, for all of us...

...Have you often drunk or used drugs more than you planned...

...Now he had only energy to sit, waiting for his pills...

...His answers, progressively more abbreviated, were reduced at times to up or down nods...

...He looked in a daze, not in pain...

...David usually went to his own house to sleep, a few blocks away...

...My mother had just cleaned me and before putting a fresh diaper on, brought me out naked to show to my aunt and uncle who were in bed...

...When we first saw Parviz on Thursday night, I thoughtthat he looked better than expected...

...Marjan joon, this is Madam Doktor and her son, Iraj...

...A friend asked why I am writing this story...

...There were vice grips and ballbearings, and large springs and red-colored jacks of different sizes...

...that was what she liked to hear...

...She used to come and tutor you when you were in high school...

...corn THE DIALECTICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE A Methodological Proposal by Charles Dickinson If Christianity—including Christian faith and theology—is to avoid becoming totally out of touch with the world—a museum piece at best, a force of baleful reaction at worst—it must constantly update itself by constant interaction, dialogue, dialectic with all the important intellectual currents, movements, disciplines of today...

...Only the day before, when my mother sat beside his bed, sing-songing to him with her sad flowery Kermanshahi accent, "Did you see what happened to us, my little brother, my little beloved...

...Perhaps with writing about Parviz, not only his death but also his life, I am attempting to transform the pain of his loss into something better, something comfortable...

...He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from Columbia University...

...On Monday the week before his death, there was news from Los Angeles: Parviz is deteriorating rapidly, the hospice nurse says he has perhaps a week, and "he says two nights...

...Condemned to death...

...His mouth was slightly open, blocked by his soft and bloated tongue...

...At '7fArerc~ we know what works...

...It reminded me of my distant cousin Marjan, who has been bedridden, paralyzed due to an epilepsy-related illness, for a good ten years...

...Actually, the two nights had already expired...

...You missed a couple of the pills...

...I took a long shower that morning...

...Seeing the con-fused look on all of our faces, he smiled and translated from Kurdish, which he spoke in addition to English and Persian, "you don't know what beteram means...

...Are you sure he will fit...

...Reflecting on those—my uncle's—last few days, I find myself more at peace with the idea of death...

...But he appeared nowhere close to death, or someone who has "two nights...

...By the time I saw her last, early in 1999, she had no physical function except for some eyelid movement...

...Over her bed hung a large framed picture of a beautiful young teenager with a broad, dimply, sparkly smile...

...I had developed a sense of "ownership" of my uncle's dying process, as though we were partners in this...

...The wooden counter at the front, where the grips and the jacks were, had a movable top that you could lift to get in or, in my case, just crawl under...

...Have you frequently drunk or used drugs to relieve emotional discomfort such as sadness, anger or boredom...

...We were all united in thinking that improved morale would help him fight the disease and live longer...

...He really doesn't look too bad, I thought...

...Lying on the bed, unshaven with his nails grown long, his skin turning mustardy yellow, his nose and forehead scarred from the disease and falls, and with his arm and leg muscles melted away, he looked very much like my grandfather, his father, who had died ten months earlier—one day less...

...In the process, it must not lose its soul, or else it becomes useless...

...His typical sense of humor and verbal bantering had in fact lasted as late as Saturday, after the falls and the insertion of the bladder tube...

...It means I want to go fart," and quietly laughed at our expense, with his head down...

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...On Friday morning, we had to help him sit up on the edge of the queen-size bed, and gently coax him to eat, drink, and take his medication...

...Our conversations "with" him that day would continue to center around medication, food, water, and his beloved overly sweetened iced tea...

...It was great hiking or sailing weather, or just for sitting around in the sun...

...J have noticed, happily, that after writing about painful experiences, the act of writing itself becomes incorporated into the original story...

...I have long thought of death as a most significant event in life, where, with incomprehensible suddenness, all accumulated knowledge, experience, memories, thoughts, and feelings disappear, as though they never existed...

...I had urinated on Parviz early in my life, and in his own humorous fashion, he had paid me back at the end of his...

...Photographs, handcrafts, a favorite chair, or a zucchini patch planted years ago...

...Dearborn, MI 4812' (313) 624-9784 roww...

...Once every few months Parviz came to Tehran to buy parts, and he stayed with us...

...Having observed, or rather participated in, the process once, it is no longer an unknown to fear...

...For Clergy and Men Religious dial 1 (800) 634-4155...

...She couldn't do much anyway...

...A cousin, exasperatedly and somewhat self(Continued on page 22) Commonweal 19 August 13, 2004 (Continued from page 19) righteously, called him a crybaby...

...She was only eighteen when she became ill...

...God forbid anybody wanting to go take a shower after you guys, no water left in the neighborhood...

...Breakfast was at the sunny dining table by the kitchen, interrupted often by runs to the bedroom to check my uncle's breathing...

...Is addiction a Liberal or Conservative Issue...

...My sister has hardly been able to bring herself to talk about Marjan for years, much less see her...

...Neither do I fear inexistence quite so much, though this may have less to do with Parviz than many other lessons learned as I approach middle age...

...During Parviz's last few days, every time something went wrong, Louise would shake her head and mournfully say that even "this is a wedding party," meaning compared to what was to come next...

...What remains of a man, dead...

...That day, after that last humiliation, we had all gathered around him, sisters and wife, and children and niece and nephew, trying to convince him not to get off the bed, that he no longer needed to exert himself for the long walk to the bathroom, talking to him like a child with only half a mind...

...When my untrained, possibly untrainable, cats yawn or stretch, I get very mushy...

...Those cool summer nights, we all slept on the large second-floor balcony, with mattresses laid side-by-side on the ground to cover the entire length, and sheets on the rails so "neighbors wouldn't see us naked...

...I had already yelled at her once about interfering with our work...

...One of the worst things about watching someone die is that there is nothing to look forward to...

...For Women Religious dial 1 (800) 626-6910...

...Oh yes, sir, don't worry...

...On the other hand, various observers of the church in the world—perhaps most notoriously Max Weber—have interpreted how Christianity and the world have, for better or for worse, reacted upon one another...

...We will repeat these memories until they are ingrained into our children's consciousness, even as they are diluted with every retelling, like genes passed through generations...

...They become one with us and our children, integrated and comfortable...

...The answer is not clear, even to myself...

...We ate in the middle of the windowy second-floor living room on a large throw cloth around which we all gathered and talked and argued and sometimes even fought...

...She approved...

...Have you ever drunk or used enough so that the next day you could not remember what you had said or done...

...His breathing had become more labored, "from the head," as the hospice nurse had told us...

...His breathing had an echoey hollow sound like the rapid blowing and releasing of a small balloon with great, and thankfully unconscious, effort...

...If you answered yes to any of the above, call Guest House...

...Am I trying to close the book on the pain of watching him decline or to remind myself of what he meant to me when I was a child...

...Could it be that death, then, really is not closing the book after all...

...She re-members, she recognizes you," both parents said with joy...

...Kermanshah was a happy refuge...

...Some of the morphine dribbled out from the corner of his mouth...

...On his time off, he and I would go to the movies or have lunch, and sometimes I tagged along and went to the south-ern parts of the city, where the bazaar and all the merchants were, normally off-limits to me, and watched him bargain and buy...

...And my city friends' skepticism did not bother me, because the drive had happened for sure, at least in my mind...

...Parviz joon, this is Iraj...

...They lift her from the bed daily and exercise individual muscles...

...May I die for you," he gathered up some strength, rolled his eyes toward her, no longer able even to tilt his head, and whispered, "God forbid...

...Early on the afternoon of that Tuesday, the two men slowly rolled Parviz's tightly wrapped body, with the outline of his hands placed on his chest visible, out through the garage and into one of the vans...

...That morning, I was summoned by my sister's calm yet forceful voice after hearing a soft thump...

...Many mornings, instead of playing in the street, I got up early and went to work with my grandfather and uncle...

...He was already weak and confused...

...I can still feel the chilly night air and the warmth of the thick homemade comforters, under which we hid completely, ignoring the worried calls from our parents: "You will suffocate like that...

...He had fallen into the bathtub as he turned to enter the toilet...

...Isn't it a shame for a strong man like him to go six feet under the ground...

...writing, and I used to read these out loud, trying to get the exotic words and accents perfectly right...

...In fact, I imagine that, if I should live a very long life, as my grandfather did, nearly to the age of ninety-nine, with my body slowing, friends dying, memories fading, and no longer having an appetite for new ventures, the expectation of death may be a comfort, and achieving it a fitting and thankfully inevitable end...

...The back was dark and musty, full of large unfamiliar metal pieces and parts, and every-thing you touched was wonderfully covered with dusty grease...

...During a pause, he looked up severely, and with an angry-looking face said: "I want to go beteram...

...My mom is here also...

...Two hungry sparrows flew all about, from table to chair, in circles through the single naked tree nearby and over the concrete-potted grass patch, playing and eating...

...The lined parking spots in front, only feet from my face, were nearly full, with one rusted old car idling, spewing smoke...

...I placed an eyedropper of concentrated morphine under his tongue...

...No, dear, the yellow is to help you sleep at night...

...Now, feeling the warm dark yellow-and-rust-color urine on my leg, I also laughed...

...What ever you would like, I will do gladly," he answered earnestly and with a low voice, his provincial accent magnified and harder to understand without his false teeth...

...He was awake, in bed, and cried when he saw us...

...Commonweal 18 August 13, 2004 "His breathing is not good at all," my mother called out to me...

...He really doesn't want to die...

...Louise was afraid of spending that night in the bedroom with Parviz...

...Their truck-parts store was near the edge of town, where all the repair shops and auto parts stores were, by the big highway going past the refinery and out of the city...

...His first wife had taken nearly a year to die of the same illness...

...The tables were placed on a narrow concrete strip of a sidewalk flush against the window...

...My cousin David, the younger of Parviz's two sons, and I sat on the living room carpet, playing a mediocre yet aggressive game of chess, drinking freezer-kept vodka, and running to the darkened bedroom every time we thought we couldn't hear breathing over the unreliable baby monitor...

...He had a wonderful provincial accent, with all the "wrong" vowels and unexpected extra consonants, which made the simplest word mysterious to my ears and his tales fun to hear for even the tenth time...

...She held his hand...

...This simple joy would not last long, of course, as on the next day, a tiny speck of sweet from his provincial birthplace of Kermanshah, just flown over eight thousand miles by my mother, would be his last food...

...Last week we had a deceased who weighed four hundred pounds...

...Two nights...

...Answer-Yes and Yes Addiction has no regard for Partisan Theology or Politics...

...Commonweal 24 August 13, 2004 The next morning, I sat at one of two limping outdoor metal tables at a coffee-and-bagel shop, shifting my tailbone from side to side on the narrow uncomfortable chair, a sagging paper cup in hand...

...I asked...

...This human, alive to begin with, has been reduced in stepwise fashion to a complex machine, and then a simple machine, and then an object...

...It was here that my grandfather talked about his World War I days and when he swam the width of the Karoon River, "two kilometers," with his clothes on his head so they wouldn't get wet...

...They had told us that hearing is the last sense to go...

...The decline may take long, and may well be painful, uncomfortable, and even lonely, but at least I have seen it and know what to expect...

...They take turns staying with her...

...The store was a wonder and a playground...

...It was true...

...True, Parviz had been a strong man with large and muscular features and darkly tanned skin, and also gentle with a soft warm voice and always a smile...

...Have you frequently drunk or used drugs to relieve physical symptoms such as headaches, pain or sleep problems...

...With time, objects are re-called less intensely, sensations fade, and favorite tales take up a different voice, the new voice of the living, and no longer that of the loved one lost...

...He looked like a bad, oversized...

...I wish she didn't...

...As the body is slowly stripped of the soul, layer-by-layer, it becomes simply a mechanical collection of parts and resulting functions: eating, drinking, breathing, urinating, defecating...

...can she hear...

...What if something went wrong...

...Sometimes he momentarily forgot basic information such as the fact that his older son was no longer dating but was married and expecting his first baby in March...

...I think if one has had a life long enough, or better yet, lived it to fullness, with intensity and peace, learning and achievement, rest and work, kindness and pain, anger and sorrow, and happiness and regret, all the emotions, a suitcase filled with desires and another with fulfillment, then death should not draw pity, but perhaps admiration, as in looking at the autograph on the bottom corner of an inspired painting...

...Perhaps I am drawn to the subject simply because I was born in a country infatuated with death, where holidays mark the passing of historical and religious figures—not their birth—where fabled fathers unknowingly kill their sons in battle, where mythological kings feed skulls of their subjects to snakes growing on their shoulders, and where fairy-tale love stories all end in suicide...

...I, the acknowledged scientist of the family, quoted vague studies to this effect while others expressed surprise at his weakness...

...he was surely not riding high into the sunset...

...You remember Madam Doktor's daughter...

...she would say...

...Maybe some got absorbed, I thought...

...I volunteered to spend the night in the bed next to my uncle, but David decided that he would stay...

...It was an amalgam of egg-plant, tomato, chicken, salt and pepper eaten with lots of bread—the kind of dish you imagine men learn to make as bachelors or when in the army...

...How does he know...

...Even on Fri-day morning, in the light of day, he wasn't doing too badly to my eye...

...With this introduction, Marjan's eyelid movements became faster, though not necessarily more deliberate, and you could see tears well up in her eyes...

...I had decided that the solution was humor, and preached and practiced this often...

...May I put them on your tongue...

...He seemed to enjoy his iced tea and a small piece of cake that I fed him slowly, in place of a proper meal, which he could no longer swallow...

...The sky was shiny blue with only one or two cottony white clouds at a distance by the mountains, the same mountains that had reminded us many times of the jagged peaks of Kermanshah...

...He was in no pain...

...There is a story about my first trip as a baby to Kermanshah...

...Having him like this is better than not having Iraj Isaac Rahmim, a writer and consultant based in Texas, is currently working on a book of essays on the making of a Jewish Iranian American...

...She is fed through a tube to her stomach, cannot speak...

...Acouple of days before dying, Parviz's urine bag came open as we tried to re-adjust him, and poured urine down my knee and leg...

...Historians and theologians have traced the development of Christian doctrine, and even offered theories to explain it...

...They walked into the shop, and emerged moments later vigorously shaking dry-sounding bagels out of wax paper, spraying crumbs onto the cracked concrete by the door...

...I used to marvel at the dexterity and strength of my uncle running, actually running, up and down the flimsy wooden ladder with both hands piled full of merchandise...

...Perhaps this was my urgent attempt at repairing the strains in my relationship with Parviz that had developed as I grew older and asserted myself as an adult...

...He seemed cognizant of who we were, and what was going on...

...In relation to his declining faculties over that last month, we had formed a rapid-news network, passing information on any and all aspects of his health, what was deteriorating, and how fast...

...I cannot say that we had less love for one another during the last few years, but less friendship, less intimacy...

...Is it to put these memories on paper before I forget the exact sound of Parviz's voice, the feel of his meaty and powerfully large hands, and his humor...

...perhaps he could hear me...

...His tales were joyful and juicy, and made you want to follow him around and do as he did...

...I am not sure if these stories were all true, but we believed them, and later back in the big city, recounted them to our not-so-fortunate friends with our own twists and embellishments...

...We'll take good care of him...

...He then brought up his cupped hand rapidly, hurling the pills into the back of his throat, as people do...

...The night before we knew the end was near...

...Being Jewish in Iran had trained him well, and many others of his generation, in this kind of deferential tone...

...consequently he had stopped taking most visitors...

...His tone was that of a man determined to cooperate...

...He could no longer discuss the pills, as he used to: "So now I take two blue ones, and one yellow one, right...

...Seeingthis, the two sparrows hopped onto the new feast—bypassing me and my unsteady table and (by now) cold cup of coffee—taking note neither of the pebbles nor the car noise and the cloud of smoke, and sang joyously as they ate...

...I could not lift him any more...

...The sky was brilliant blue, the sun shining, atypical for this suburb of Los Angeles...

...We could really do nothing if the breathing stopped...

...There will be memories of events and of stories told...

...Sensations remain, of the feel of the skin, its roughness and temperature, in a handshake or an embrace, of the inflection of the voice or the cracking of laugh-ter, of the childhood joy of a surprise visitor from a far-off town...

...But perhaps also in time, these memories simply embed themselves so deeply into our minds and our flesh that we no longer notice them as external...

...And so we might be excused for believing that the loved one remains with us after all...