My father died 20 years ago today, actually, 20 years ago last night. You see, according to the rabbis, last night is today. The Jewish day begins not at midnight, nor at dawn, but in the evening when, with the fading of the light, the third star (or planet) becomes visible. We count days from dusk to dusk.

When Dad became unable to swallow, we had to put him in a home where they could maintain the feeding tube that had to be inserted through his abdominal wall into his stomach. That was six heroic years after the original stroke that took his vision, his balance and much of the use of his right arm. I can see now that he was then already senile, but at the time he was just, to use his phraseology, "my old man." Never one given over to gabbing, by then he was almost completely silent, but, really, what was there left to say?

I'd come to visit him at the Hebrew Home and Hospital, every day. I'd stand at his bedside and slide my left hand into his good, left hand, like we were going to shake. He'd ask, "Dave?" I'd respond, "Yea, it's me, Dad." Sometimes while we held hands like that, I might say a thing or two. If I asked him a question, he'd reply. But, even before his strokes, our conversations were never very wordy. During the 30-40 minutes I stood there on the left side of his bed, our left hands engaged, I'd reach out with my right hand and stroke his brow and hair. The hand-holding and hair-stroking were things he never would have allowed before he was struck down.

For a couple of weeks at the end, when he entirely lost consciousness, I would go visit him twice a day, still holding his hand, stroking his brow more regularly. Towards the very end, they transferred him to another, more clinical ward. He was having trouble breathing. The harried doctor wanted to put him on morphine, an action that would ease, but hasten his death. When I objected the doctor scolded me, "He can't get enough air. It's like breathing through a straw. How would you like to breathe through a straw?" With that I immediately agreed, feeling that the doctor had been unduly severe with someone whose father was dying. Now I realize that he was just too busy, needing to attend to numerous other old folks making, or close to making, their exits.

There, in the privacy that the curtains allowed, more than once I climbed into bed aside him and hugged him, held him, crying, more softly than I am crying now, writing this.

His last day was a Sunday. I had already made my morning visit when, in the early afternoon, the rabbi called and asked me if I could relieve the young man who was overseeing the industrial kosher kitchen where preparations for some festive banquet were underway. I agreed, planning to visit Dad again on my way home. But afternoon became evening became night and, with visiting hours already over, I went straight home. There I found a message on my machine from the Hebrew Home to call them.

That was twenty years ago, in 2003. Twenty years before that, in 1983, I graduated from naturopathic medical school. There, in my freshman year, on a campus that had once been a Catholic girls' summer camp, an hour and a half north of San Francisco on the Russian River, we did 36 weeks of human dissection on six dead bodies. We also learned Tai Chi, not as part of our formal education, but those of us who wanted to, extracurricularly.

Our Tai Chi teacher told us that the ghosts were so thick on campus that for him it felt like walking through spider webs. He told us that the ghosts, hungry for attention, for something that approximates human interaction, liked to slip into the dead bodies, particularly as we young students delicately dissected them. He instructed us to burn incense and leave out bowls of food for the ghosts. (I could tell you about my own definitive encounter with the ghost of a Catholic nun, who decades after her death could still not relinquish power, but that is another story.)

The Jews, too, believe in spirits, unhappy ghosts who plague susceptible individuals (psychiatric cases) and take advantage of dead bodies, giving rise to our tradition to "watch" or "guard" the corpse.

I went, that Sunday evening, twenty years ago last night, after calling the Hebrew Home, to sit with the corpse of my father, respectfully covered with a sheet, alone in what during the day served as some sort of exam room. I lifted the sheet many times to take last looks. His face was twisted, mouth open, as though he had suffered, gasping for air. So much does life struggle to hold on. I knew even then that it was the body struggling, that any spark of consciousness that might have been there at the end was completely in the dreamlike embrace of "sweet Sister Morphine." But I'm glad that I was not there for the death throes.

Early the next morning, the man from the burial society showed up and rolled Dad's body off to wash and dress it in preparation for the burial that would take place that very day. Every Jewish community has a group of volunteers, the Holy Association, that performs that preparation.

I had called family members and the rabbi with the news from my home, the night before, when I first learned. All the arrangements were made with almost no input on my part. We, again as Dad would say, "planted" my father with a brief, well-attended graveside ceremony. Immediately after, there was a large get-together at my house, everyone bringing food.

My father's death anniversary is always momentous for me. The weird coincidence this year is that two evenings ago, Saturday night, the local rabbi here in town called me to tell me that a 90-year-old member of the local community had just died, and to asked me if I would, the next morning, serve as a member of the Holy Association, and help prepare the body for burial. I agreed and the next morning, Sunday, yesterday, assisted greatly by a third person, helped the rabbi in this solemn obligation, a difficult task made more difficult by the unexpected presence of the grieving, much younger widow.

The inconvenience of her presence was, of course nothing, if the last glimpses of her now departed husband gave her any comfort at all. We three guys did what we had to do, using as much respect and tact with the body as we would have had we been alone. Still, it was impossible not to be affected by the widow's very present, very fresh grief.

As it turned out, the highly-ritualized process included a 40-minute break, after the washing, as we waited for the burial clothes and dust from the Holy Land to arrive from Mexico City courtesy of a driver who set off for those at 4am. The corpse washed and dressed, I went home. A few hours later, the third man having sat with the corpse in the interim, the dearly departed was interned in a sunny, well-attended ceremony in the graveyard next to Real de Minas. The rabbi, prohibited from saying the Mourners' Kaddish because his parents are still alive, asked me to recite it at the ceremony's end. Local musician Doug Robinson congratulated me on my heart-felt rendition, "David, I had no idea."

That evening, last night, the theme of death and remembrance continued for me as I lit the traditional Yartziet candle, the memorial flame to mark the anniversary of my father's passing. Having asked a friend back in West Hartford to say the Kaddish for my father (Yisroel Yakov ben [the son of] Avraham Leib) with the required quorum of ten men, I nonetheless performed my own private service, saying my own Kaddish last night and again this morning, as I will this afternoon, before three stars appear in the twilight sky.

A dead body is an absurd, nonsensical thing, a receipt for something that once had value, a key to a treasure that no longer exists. The soul of the departed continues to resonate in this world, but his lifeless body is an affront and an embarrassment.

If you start with some utopian fantasy, as so many young people do today, then our society, what we have collectively fashioned here in this world, seems paltry at best. If you start with a belief in the goodness of all cultures, then the recent spasm of evil in Israel must be explained by other, convoluted means. The victims of that pogrom, lying bloody where they fell, on the ground, on floors, and still in bed, are our shame and reproach.

The Jewish day begins as night falls. First there is the darkness. The traditional evening prayer of the Hebrews praises and thanks God for "darkening the evenings." Love, love, yes, love and light, but we Jews hold fast to a more practical vision. Our more sober religiosity understands that without the darkness, the struggle and, God forbid, the suffering, the process of living would be severely diminished.

Yes, Jews believe in a better world. (We invented the idea of progress.) But when, from the perfection of that "end of days," we look back upon these trials it will be with nostalgia. We have to kvetch (complain); it's in our nature.

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