JUNE 13, 2012
A Good Man
I never planned to write a book, much less a book on my relationship with my dad. But something happened to me during the days leading up to his funeral, at the funeral itself, and in the days thereafter.
I had heard that old epithet -- “a good man” -- in reference to Dad so many times that it passed from a cliché to an irritant to a haunting refrain. I had lost count of the people who had applied it to Dad when they’d reached out to me.
At first, I thought that the cliché was just an easy out, words for people who didn’t know what else to say.
But then I realized that they were taking the phrase back. Through their repetition, if not their realization, they were redeeming words that I thought had been put out to linguistic pasture.
Some of the more startling instances came back to me as I knelt in the dark beside Dad’s coffin on the morning of the funeral. A prominent U.S. senator who knew Dad