My life comes back to me in picture memories, sometimes when I least expect them. Consider this blog an album of those memories that will give me clarity concerning my father and my relationship to him both before and after his homosexual pedophilia was uncovered. Come with me on this journey if you will, as it is complex and I am recovering from its fallout.

Deuteronomy 5:8 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations who love me and keep my commandments."

The slight, glassy-eyed funeral director's black suit smelled of too many years of mortuary carnations and formaldehyde. He gave my sister and me a practiced frozen smile as he led us to a stark, well-lit back room to identify the body of our father.

 It was a Sunday morning, and Daddy had been dead just over twenty-four hours. I thought I would be shocked to see his still, lifeless body.  But, he was wrapped in a sterile white sheet and his left arm fell across his chest naturally, as though he were sleeping peacefully. His hand was deep purple from the intravenous needles.  All the warmth that had once surged through his ample body had escaped, replaced with the chill of the refrigerated vault where his flesh was being preserved until his cremation. I was eerily aware of being in an alternate universe where bodies are not inhabited and people always remembered as they looked when sleeping -thoughtless, motionless, maybe peaceful, maybe not.

"That's Daddy," we confirmed. It was and it wasn't, of course. The quiet form looked like Daddy, but his body was a vessel emptied of its purpose by years of use and now shelved. The crown of his head had always been bald, but once his hair had been brown. It was not evident that his  teeth were missing or that his eyes had been dark and dancing. All of his life he was large for his age. He loved to eat, he loved to cook, he loved cheesecake - he was a big man. When he was not asleep, he wore glasses - early on, wire rims and later, big dark plastic frames. If he thought it would make some kid laugh, he would contort his face, even taking out his teeth with his tongue, which he thought was hilarious. No one looking at him in this mortuary moment would guess that about this large corpse lying inert on the table.

The last time I had seen Daddy alive was three weeks earlier when he was still in the hospital. I knew when I left him that day and got back on the plane to go home to California that my next trip would be on different terms. I had said good-bye to him then. He had lifted a bluish, trembling hand and, as tears glistened in his eyes, he said: "I miss you, Kay." I know he did. I really know he did.

An obsequious, frail mortician attached a metal bracelet to Daddy's left wrist. Not decorative, of course. Just an indestructible ID tag to differentiate between Daddy's remains and some less specific ashes. My stomach involuntarily knotted with the thought. Dust to dust in incendiary violence, crackling, snapping, popping and Daddy is ashes - "cremains." Then we are to put Daddy in a decorative ceramic urn with some scene from a serene Chinese garden meticulously painted or maybe decaled on it. An entire life sealed in a jar, emotion vaporized, passion checked, worry dissipated, addictions vanquished, hope perhaps realized, perhaps not.

Back at the glossy, slick cherrywood salon table in the mortuary we signed away our father to his conflagration. For the grief counselor, a former minister with slicked back hair who wore an expensive suit and had splashed on too much cologne,  trying to upsell my sister and me on pre-need funeral arrangements for our beloved and us was all in a day's work - the ashes and freezers, embalming fluid and tears, and the bodies people loved now already decaying. Sitting there, we were aliens on their planet and primed for attack. Economic indicators are there to show the ups and downs of daily life.  We cannot buy what we cannot afford. But Death is always for sale - can't escape it. It is everyone's inevitability. Must be buried or burned. You never know when the Grim Reaper might come roaring out of time and snuff out a life, disease ridden or careening down Interstate-35. Everyone must be ready.  Need to make plans now so those who love you will still love you after they discover you did not make arrangements for or fund your own funeral.

It rose up in us with an ugly face, the knowing that the aura of death in the room was not the impetus for comfort and compassion but for profit. My sister grabbed the words as they spilled guilty and practiced from the former preacher's mouth. Stopped him short."What are you trying to sell us?"

"Uhmm, well, uh!" No practice for this question.

Then he somehow perceived himself to be our victim. Red-faced and combative, he packed up his belongings and traipsed from the room. We had, after all, not allowed him to finish his spiel, or even really get rolling with it. The man's behavior was moronic, but we still took on the culpability for his histrionics. Emotions are difficult to isolate when there are so many of them swirling overhead like cacophonous birds. Add sleep deprivation and the countless duties left undone by the deceased to the maelstrom and it is surprising we made it out of the mortuary unscathed.

We left Daddy there, asleep in the freezer and returned to his house to sort through the remnants of his life. That our father had enjoyed a secret life from the one he had presented to our family and the world had been revealed to us over twenty years earlier when he had first been arrested. What we did not know until we began the arduous task of reaping from among his belongings what was valuable from what was dross was that our father had vastly exceeded what we considered possible. Daddy had always been someone else - our father, too - but this other disturbing, injured, and devious individual driven by the uncontrolled neediness of a heart and soul consumed by a destructive darkness. It was an innocence-stealing blackness that seemed to make him as blind to the carnage he created as his victims were to his ultimate intentions. Daddy thought he "loved." Instead, with tentacles groping toward trusting, unsuspecting prey, he took with calculated pleasure what one should be free to give away.