Eight years ago today, my father, Michael William "Brother Mike" Gural, died. I wasn't by his side. I was here, sleeping after an overnight shift at the AP, because I had a horrible boss at the time. Of course I could have insisted on taking more FMLA leave, but I didn't. I will always regret that.
I think it gets harder every year. That pit in my stomach feels as deep as it did on that train ride home to Massachusetts. I weep as mournfully today as I did when I first saw him in a casket in the funeral home, and when the monks lowered it into the ground.
The loss is daunting and profound. Euripides said, "To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter." My father never got to grow old. He worked and worked and then he was diagnosed with cancer. He suffered and then he died. What stings worse is that he never met his precious grandson.
The pain is incomparable. And that's compounded by my ongoing struggle with faith. I was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith, by a devout mother and her parents, who often hosted the hierarchs and other clergy at the homes where I grew up. We made frequent pilgrimages to churches and monaserteries across the Northeast, including the monastery where my father is buried alongside my maternal grandparents.
As Aldous Huxley said, "My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing." We spent many hours on Wilbraham Mountain, a short hike from the cul-de-sac where I grew up and my mother still lives. In the early years, it was often Tex (our purebred German Shepard who had been trained as a state police dog), dad and me, and later my sister, too. As much as I love and seem to need the city to keep me sane, I do miss escaping in the mountain. Names are very important to Russian writers, and to me. (I will take any comparison I can fairly make!) My father's mother was Jadwiga Urbanski (city dweller), and his father was Wolodya Gural (mountaineer). I never met them, but in my heart I will always be a combination of the city woman and the mountain man.
In the end, my father chose to be buried by the Russian Orthodox Church. My mother asked him many times (I heard several) if he was sure, as she didn't want him to compromise his principles or make a mockery of her faith. My father went to church on major holy days and was respectful to my mother's cleric friends. He was a spiritual man, but he believed faith was practiced within oneself, not necessarily within a house of worship. Like Henry David Thoreau said, "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." But in the end, my father insisted he wanted to be buried alongside my mother (they will share a towering grave marker in the shape of an Orthodox cross), and that he would make the required preparations through prayer and confession. Homer said, "All men have need of the gods." I question how those needs change as we get sick and grow old, and what that means to the next generation.
Like Khalil Gibran, my father respected men of all faiths. "I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit," said Gibran. It's still hard for me to reconcile that, in the end, my father chose to "pray in your church."
It's easy to use science to dismiss religion. It's much harder to use philosophy. In his last days, my father returned to many of his "life texts," re-reading them in what I think was preparation for what lied ahead. I'm struggling to figure out where my faith fits into his final decisions.
"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
_ Albert Camus
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