Dead Dads Club

I was awakened early one morning by the phone. As a teenager, I was reluctant in the extreme to drag myself out of my bed, across the bedroom, and answer it. The voice on the other end asked for Donald Caven, and I told them that he wasn't home (otherwise I would have been saved the indignity of rising in the pre-noon hours to answer this call) - I was his son. The voice told me it was coming from a retirement home in Salina, Kansas and it gave me the message that Donald Caven's father, my grandfather had died during the night. I mumbled thanks to the voice and headed back to bed. An hour or two later, I heard my father come in the front door. I dragged myself back out of bed to the bottom of the stairs and hollered up:
"Dad?"
"Yes, son?"
"Ira kicked the bucket." And I went back to bed.
I make no excuses for my callousness. I only offer as explanation that my family has always maintained a rather cynical distance from death. We make light and dance on the edge of gravesides, not unlike John Belushi in "Don't Look Back In Anger." Our behavior during the mourning period for my father must have struck many as troubling. What was all this snickering and guffawing? I have made a certainty of those closest to me making light of me when I shuffle off this mortal coil.
And that's okay. I talked to my father some years after I shouted at him from the bottom of the stairs and told him that I regretted being so callow and unfeeling. Beneath his goofy exterior, my father was quite the marshmallow. He cried each and every time he heard "Stars and Stripes Forever" or "Amazing Grace." He hugged and kissed his sons well past the time that they were squirming and wiping them off. It's not like we were emotionally distant.
We laugh in the face of Death - or to be more precise, we tend to walk up to Death and point to a spot on his robe. "Hey Death, what's that?" When he looks down, we flick him in that black space where his nose should be - gotcha!