When my dad handed me the file of his writings and asked me to publish them, I read over them all and hoped there would be more coming. The ones on economic and political issues were interesting enough, but it wasn't until the last few posts that he really got to the meat of what I, personally, wanted to hear from him.

My dad died early in the morning on Wednesday, July 17, 2013. The post "The Vast Unknowable" was his final public utterance. In the days since, I have far better come to understand that he intended it exactly that way. He wanted to be defined more by his thoughts on what he deemed weightier matters than by the fact that he had lived with ALS for two decades and was facing the end. He was trying to define his legacy on his own terms.

It saddens me to say that he was mistaken about what that legacy truly was. While I will never forget his admonition against debt ("If you spend more than you make, sooner or later you'll go broke," which he probably said that to me hundreds of times), that's hardly the piece of him that I most value or carry deepest within me. As we faced his final weeks and now his death and have experienced the outpouring of love that his dying has inspired in people who knew him, it has been clear that his true legacy exists on a far deeper level. I say it saddens me because it tells me that he didn't think it was enough to love well and be loved, when really that's the most important thing of all.

So that final post--a riff on the "vast unknowable" that underpins all our lives, ending with a laugh--seems more right than he even knew, as goodbyes go. He'll be remembered for what he called his "pontifications," sure, but much more for his laughter and his love.

And so it is with that in mind that I'm going to start posting here on what I've witnessed and experienced as I spent the final weeks of his life and now the first days of his death with him. I want to be clear that it's not that I think there's anything especially tragic or unique about our situation. But as I face these first days of the absence of his physical presence in my life, I can think of nothing more important in the world than to say, again and again and again, how much I loved and will always love him.

And so I write.

It was a Fourth of July tradition in our house for my dad to put on a record of Sousa marches and let the neighborhood know that patriotism was alive and well in the Lanin household, so yesterday we did exactly that.

We listened to the "Washington Post March," "Hands Across the Sea," "The Invicible Eagle," "Semper Fidelis." We listened to "The Liberty Bell," and I told him that even if I live to be 106, I will never not cheerfully associate that march with Monty Python.

But of course our favorite is "The Stars and Stripes Forever." He used to air-piccolo to the feature piccolo. (You know the one I mean.) And over the softer third theme, what's known as the trio, he taught us to sing a silly song, which I will now teach you:

So be kind to your web-footed friends,
For a duck may be somebody's mother.
They live in the fields and the swamp [here pronounced like 'stamp']
Where it's very cold and damp.
And you may think that this is the end.
Well it is.

I sang that to him yesterday and he laughed like hell.