I didn’t know exactly what to say. “I’m sorry about your father.”
“It’s all right. It was eight years ago. He was out driving fence posts, and he just went. Heart attack. At least he was outside, doing something he loved.”
True enough, I supposed. Even though I didn’t have any earthly idea of exactly what driving a fence post entailed, I thought it would be better to go that way, in the wind and the sun, and not in some hospital bed. Death didn’t frighten me at all; I knew too much about what waited on the other side, knew that death was a transition and nothing more.
Pain, on the other hand….
“So is that how you got into astronomy?” I asked. The question probably sounded like what it was, an obvious attempt to change the subject, but I didn’t see any point in dwelling on painful memor
