My father passed last week. Today I’m an orphan.

In the nearly 25 years of writing this column, I have seldom brought in personal matters. I figured we all have “stuff”, and I didn’t want to bore you with mine.

But this week I beg your indulgence. Many of you can relate since the winter holidays usually create an uptick in obituaries and death notices. Blame it on the weather, an increase in pneumonia, flu, and depression – December and early January can be cruel months for grieving families.

Poet Dylan Thomas urged his father to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But that’s unfair to those who humbly seek rest. At 94 years of age, my father wasn’t broken but merely tired. As he faced his final weeks, my wife gave me good advice. “Let him know that you’ll be OK. Give him that reassurance.”

So I told him not to rage; I urged him to join my mother for Christmas. I thought I saw him nodding, but frankly I’m not really sure what he understood or heard at the end.

Many of you have faced the same challenge. Hopefully, you were surrounded by kind and welcoming caregivers (as I was at Lakeview Hospital). They see the aging process on a daily basis. They can offer warmth and clinical answers, but even they, like us, cannot totally understand the mystery of death.

Novelist John Updike (who also passed away this year) once described the futility of defining or explaining a life through an obituary or funeral sermon. “It’s like a dress with no one in it,” he wrote.

He’s correct. I can note my father’s pride at serving as a combat engineer in World War II, but I can’t fully express or even understand the unselfish courage it took to participate in D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge, experiencing joys and hardships I never can, seeing things I never saw. I can write several sentences about his work history, but I cannot feel his great satisfaction and fulfillment of being honored as the Craftsman of the Year, or receiving a 10-cent-an-hour raise in 1937.

Lives are best lived, not described.

But we are left with words – words I said to him as he prepared for his next great adventure, words said about him in the days following his death.

And that’s all we can do. My son via Facebook called him his hero. You were mine too, Dad.

Here’s to all the heroes you and I have been blessed to know.

Merry Christmas.