I’m in my hometown of Kansas City. Last Saturday, our mother called my sister Elizabeth and me to tell us to come home right away; our father was in the hospital. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a day that the TSA declared to be one of the heaviest travel holidays in U.S. history, in a true miracle, Elizabeth and I both managed to get early-morning, non-stop, non-delayed flights home. From the moment we arrived, the four of us were together until the very end.

It’s too soon for me to be able to put this transcendent experience into words, or to begin to describe my love and admiration for my father, so here’s the note we sent to family and friends:

We wanted to let you know that our beloved husband and father, Jack Craft, died last night from an aortic valve infection. We were so lucky that the four of us spent those last days together, reminiscing with stories — visits to Six Flags in 100-degree heat, picnics on the beach in Nantucket, driving across Germany, and eating free funnel cakes in Eureka Springs — laughing over old jokes, and discussing the next mayor’s race in Los Angeles. As Jack requested, there will not be a memorial service. Until the end, he remained himself — good-natured, clear-thinking, curious, optimistic about the Cornhuskers, and full of love for us.

The pain of loss is the price we pay for love, and my mother, Elizabeth, and I are reeling. We keep telling each other that we can’t imagine a world without “Smilin’ Jack.” But we are comforted by the knowledge that our father had a great life, full of activity and enthusiasms, right until the sudden end, and that he faced death with lawyerlike clarity and sweet equanimity.

As true Midwesterners, as a family we are undemonstrative and almost never say anything like, “I love you.” But that doesn’t matter at all. Our love is too deep for words. My father was loving, loved, and knew how beloved he was.

“Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Onward,