My Dad died today.

We were warned and I was lucky enough to be able to fly out to Florida and spend some time with him this weekend.

I really went because my daughter, Ceara, had never met him and wanted the chance.

I really didn’t have any unfinished business, no last-minute resentments or apologies to blurt out: we’d sorted that out a while back.

Given the economy, I was pretty much prepared to just let it be but when Ceara came to me all teary-eyed and said that it just wasn’t fair that, on top of everything else, she couldn’t meet her granddad, I decided that we’d make the trip.

So we did and she decided that he was a pretty nice guy. “He’s got spunk!”

I’d been hoping to get out to Florida and spend some time with him, building a similar “scrapbook” for him that I’d done with Mum in Dragonholder. Because it’s surprising how many things your parents forget to tell you. (Mostly because they don’t remember until asked.)

Ceara got sick — a cold picked up from a classmate, a bug caught on the plane, or just the darned Florida humidity — it’s hard to say which. Anyway, Saturday morning I went in by myself and just sat with him in companionable silence. I think we forget how much we don’t need to say; how much can be transmitted without looking, without touching; how we can communicate just with the comfort of our presence.

In the afternoon, I came back with Ceara (and a friend of hers who’d come from nearby to lend support) and I read Dad my best story so far, “Tribute.”

It was a special story for us: it has a lot of father/child interactions in it and he got it. He said, “You’ve given me a great gift!”

Ceara was suffering from the cold so we didn’t stay long but I promised to come back on Sunday before we had to get our plane back to LA.

I came back on Sunday but didn’t stay long. According to the hospice’s pamphlet, dying people do a lot of processing and shutting down and sometimes they can get overwhelmed by it so we’re not to take any abrupt changes as insulting, merely their way of getting through the stuff they need to get through before they can move on. Anyway, I mentioned something about one of our vacation spots when we were young and Dad said, “That was complex.”

We all forget that our lives and memories are different. I don’t know what was complex for my Dad about that vacation but clearly it was as he said a moment later, “You need to leave now.”

So I did, giving him a hug and telling him that I loved him.

I was hoping that he wouldn’t linger, that he didn’t have any unfinished business to tie him down. I’m glad I was right — he didn’t look comfortable and I didn’t want him to suffer: end-stage cancer.

So now my father joins Patrick Swayze (a nice guy), Michael Jackson, and a host of others who have left the stage in this year of 2009.

But, as I said when I wrote about Mr. Swayze:

“Rest well, we can take it from here.”