Death is Nothing to Us
Death means losing everything, but it is also the liberation from suffering.
My father just died
My father died last night in Spain, thousands of miles away from me. Because of the travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, I had made up my mind that I would never see him again. I wrote most of this article several days ago, so it was never intended as an obituary.
I don’t feel sorry for him. He was 92. I am the oldest of his 9 children. He was president of one university and founded the largest university in Spain. He was elected to the Spanish Parliament. He became a worldwide authority in his academic field, and many of his students also had successful careers.
We should all be that lucky.
But death comes to all of us, and my father was always afraid of death.
I remember one time that I had dinner with him at a fancy restaurant in Madrid, Los Borrachos de Velazquez. He had a rocky relationship with his children after he divorced my mother, but I had been trying to build bridges with him. This time he was genuinely interested in my views on religion. When I was 15, I abandoned the Catholicism in which he’d raised me. That created a big cleft between us that only got larger as I developed my progressive…
