ジョン・キャメロン・ミッチェルさんのインスタグラム写真 - (ジョン・キャメロン・ミッチェルInstagram)「Happy Bday Daddy! Heres pt 1 of the eulogy I read at his funeral mass (that the priest later said he disapproved of)... My Dad didn’t love his father. He told me that once. He wasn’t a “when I was your age” kind of guy. He was more of a “the truth doesn’t mean saying everything that’s on your mind” kind of guy. To me and my brothers, his past was like a redacted document. Something cool and classified with certain words glamorously blacked out. For our protection? For his? Some must’ve been secrets but some were probably memories he no longer had any use for. He shed them like old clothes. Later, they were cut away from him by a cruel disease. Dad was as mysterious and attractive as Don Draper in Mad Men, only wittier. I envisioned Mom and Dad as a modern-day Nick and Nora, somehow getting around to solving crimes between bridge and cocktails. I fancied myself his valet. Every night, he’d come home and I’d hand him the dryest Martini ever mixed by a 7 year old (he showed me how to whisper the word “Vermouth” over the gin). He taught me that a fine sense of humor can be a surgical tool, a healing balm, an antidote to stupidity and despair. And unlike his fickle memories, it never failed him. Last year we were walking past a Manitou gift shop. In the window sat a skull studded with crystals. Dad was startled, “What is that?” Mom said, “Och, it’s New Age.” Dad said, “Looks more like old age to me.” I’ve never seen a person face his affliction with such grace. Whenever you met him he seemed to remember the most wonderful things about you, whether he knew you or not. He’d recognize places he’d never been with wondrous delight. Buddhist monks meditate for lifetimes to reach the state of grace he had achieved because of his disease. Dad was simply... there now. He never told us what it was like growing up the son of an authoritarian former Commissioner of Social Security who was sweet to us kids but God help the soul who moved a pebble out of the driveway. Dad ran away and joined the Army. It made a man of him, he said, but he wasn’t one for war stories. He was the rare soldier baffled by the very existence of violence... Part 2 in next post..」9月10日 0時17分