I was fortunate to be able to read the following letter to my father on his deathbed a month ago. (I was with him as he died of pancreatic cancer peacefully this morning, in my childhood home, surrounded by loving family.) When I read it to him, he said he felt deeply seen and understood by it, which was extremely meaningful to me.
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Dear Dad,
We know this will likely be the last letter I ever write you.
I could write a whole letter about all the ways you have loved me. You’ve cared when I was hurting, you’ve given great advice through the decades, and you’ve shown a passionate interest in my writing when I’ve shared it with you.
I could also write a whole letter about all the things I love about you: the unfathomable subtlety, beauty, and brilliance of your mind; your sense of humor when you get on a roll; the way you want the people you love to thrive, and the way you support them in doing that; and obviously, your care for the world and the inspiring way you manage to keep on fighting even though you’ve never felt much hope.
Here is what I want to focus on in this last letter: the way you have impacted me. The thing I most value about myself is that I’m a writer. (I know, I’m nice and caring and all those things I’m supposed to say I value about myself too—but what breathes fire in me is my identity and practice as a writer.)
I simply cannot imagine myself as a writer without you. Thus, I cannot imagine a version of Michael that didn’t have you as my father. (The same goes for Mom, and I’ll write her that letter too.)
The thing I value most about your writing is your unrelenting commitment to getting to the bottom of what you’re thinking about. You will not stop until you get to some core insight about the thing that captures you intellectually. You poke your insights from every angle and you don’t stop until you’re satisfied that they hold water.
You are often thought of as a truth-teller for telling the truth documented in the Pentagon Papers. But I wasn’t around during that time. My lived experience of you is more as a truth-seeker. You don’t stop reading and thinking about things until you think you have found some truth. In fact, you are often blocked in writing, precisely because you feel you haven’t found the bottom of the issue, and how can you write if you’re not at the root of the issue? (That is the sense of “radical” I most appreciate about you, rather than your set of particular “radical” beliefs.)
What’s more, you enjoy the process of digging deeper into the ideas and questions you care about. Along with your love for Mom, it’s your greatest passion. (Tied for third: lovemaking and LSD, preferably combined. Tied for fourth: movies and dessert. Honorable mention to bodysurfing.)
In your reading and writing, you are rarely satisfied with the answers you come to—there is always some unexplained aspect of the thing you’re thinking about that animates you to keep going deeper into it. You cannot resist the labyrinth of ideas—which is why a list of books you’ve read would be so labyrinthine: connections upon connections.
You never related to “mysticism” that much—but in your own way you are a mystic: captivated by the Russian doll of mysteries inside mysteries of what you’re thinking about, longing and searching for the truth within them.
There’s an elemental stance of “what the fuck?” in your writing. How did this crazy thing (the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis) happen? Why did this crazy thing (the Doomsday Machine) come into existence? I must understand it!
I think that’s the deepest thing I got from you as a writer and thinker. “What the fuck?!… No really… what in the fucking fuck?!” That elemental wonder, equal parts bemused and outraged at the madness, has kept me always searching for the core of whatever I’m thinking about. It’s also given me my sense of the absurdity of so much of human life in groups—a sense I treasure, and that forms the core of my own writing.
(One of your favorite lines, also became one of my favorites, from Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”)
Since my early twenties, my intellectual interests diverged significantly from yours at the level of topics. But at the core, our intellectual interests are the same: the madness within humanity. We just explored different parts of the terrain of this madness. (It’s vast!)
One of the things I know I’ll be most grateful for in my life is that I got to show you some of my current book—which I consider to be my mature writing—while you were alive. And that you “saw” it—and therefore, you saw me—on the level I always wanted to be seen by you.
By your example, and by you always taking my ideas seriously and nurturing the intellectual and writer within me, you raised me, year after year, decade after decade, as the writer I have become. In addition to all the other wonderful things I love about you, I will be grateful to you for that till the last letter of the last word I write.
And that, my dear father, concludes this letter. But not our time together. I cherish every last day I have with you.
I will love you always.
Your grateful son,
—Michael
[Read to Daniel on his deathbed on 5/18/23; slightly edited]
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I love you Dad. I will always miss you.
We were buddies in our atheism, so… keep fighting from the eternal void of nothingness, from which we came, and where we’re all headed.
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[Here is a letter from our family about Daniel’s death this morning.]
