Last month, at mom’s funeral, everybody was commenting on how well dad seemed to be doing. At 98, he could still get around with a walker and his new hearing aids from the VA were top of the line. He recognized everybody and was swapping stories about things that had happened years and years ago. One cousin of mine said to me: “That ol’ buzzard’s going to make it to a hundred.” He only had two years to go.

I think it is was last Saturday night.  Culley Jane and I were still recovering from the trips to northern Michigan for my mother’s funeral and seeing relatives I played with as a kid but hadn’t seen in years. She was reading The New Yorker. I was reading The Quiet Americans, a book about the early years of the CIA.

My mind was somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1946 when the phone rang. I heard the deep voice of my brother-in-law, my sister’s husband. His voice was cracking. “Your dad,” he said, “has just passed.” He gave a quick summary of the details and I said ok.

I called Katy and Elly, my daughters here in Colorado. “You’re grandpa has just died,” I said.

It was their last grandparent.

“Oh, no!” they both said. “He seemed to be doing so well.” They had both been to their grandmother’s funeral.

They wanted to know what had happened.

I told them what little I knew. Dad was in the car with my sister, Kris, who was driving him around gravel backroads in the woods, looking at the early fall colors. Dad loved being in the woods. He raised a hand, placed it on his chest and… and, just died, at his daughter’s side, in the woods, in early fall.

Elli, my oldest daughter, asked me how I was feeling.

I thought for a moment. “I don’t feel sad,” I said, almost as if confessing.

That’s when Elli said to me: “I guess you don’t have to feel sad for something to be profound.”