Death is the sort of thing that can be written at length, whether in song, poem or book; there's ample amount of material to unpack. It's a great place to start one's own existential travels, asking 1) where do I come from; 2) where am I right now; and 3) where am I going?

When someone close to us does move on, we become more immune to the brevity of our time together. In our most sober moments, we recognize that death will happen to everyone we've laughed with, cried from and loved until we cross the threshold into the infinite ourselves.

Nevertheless, it is a strange transition. Seventeen years ago today on a rainy Wednesday morning, I encountered the shattering of the known with the passing of my father. Surprisingly otherworldly in the moment, as the years fell off the calendar, the clarity of that person, the realness of the one I loved, drifts away into memories of what once was, memories that fade in time where realized vivaciousness becomes a cardboard box of packed memories.

Among the reasons—and I haven't heard anyone ever put it this way before—is our knowledge/context/relationship with that person is frozen. Over time, there is a contextual shift. Yes, there was once a time I was tight with my Dad. I made sure we had dinner at least once a week together, if not twice, regardless of schedule. And at age 25, I had a lot going on, but those other things didn't matter.

However since I knew him those seventeen years ago, a lot has happened. Back in early 2004, Trump was just another rich guy in New York City—he hadn't even been on Celebrity Apprentice yet; Obama was just a state senator; and Saddam Hussein was just captured. The best Internet browser was Firefox; there was NO YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. NetFlix was just a new place where me and my geek friends would have DVDs mailed to us. Back then, there were no iPads like something off an episode of Star Trek. Phones were basically walkie talkies and we would laugh off if anybody every thought they might outperform the processing power of our desktop computers.

In a whirlwind from 2004 to 2021, in all of this time, my relationship with my Dad (and later my Mom) has been frozen. From a cultural perspective, the world he knew no longer exists. As there is no opportunity for our relationship to grow, it is boxed and put on a shelf in a storeroom full of boxes of past loved ones and friendships that have faded out of view from the twilight shining upon our finite moor.

And upon this side of eternity, maybe this is why things feel less real, that he has become relegated and locked into a two-dimensional timeline; it is because this world around me is not the world that was. In the moment, death feels like something that can be tweaked for a quick fix or as if we have a backup saved game to reload. In time, the vitality of that person is just printed upon a trivia card in my consciousness, admittedly a better fate than being engraved on a tombstone.