Everyone else remembers the day JFK died; I remember the day my father died.

In my family, I am a kind of Cassandra. The truth makes its way me, flows to me like water seeking the path of least resistance. I have never been afraid of the truth . . . even when I was very small and my mother would lift my brother and me to the window seat to watch in the night for my father's homecoming. It was very dark and the winter cold would seep through the windowpane and make me shiver in my Dr. Dentons. There were nights my father did not come home until early morning, and although my mother never said a word, never gave shape to her fears, never explained anything, long after we were out of Dr. Dentons and had lives of our own to occupy every waking moment, in my dreams I knew that one day Daddy really wouldn't come home.

Only I had to remain mute. There was no place in my family -- or perhaps anywhere in those post-war days of three square meals, Saturday matinees, and renewed faith -- for anything but the pursuit of happiness. Instead, I was ever alert to the disaster awaiting a family with a father who gambled. Whether to answer an internal cry or the externals of a wife and three children, he gambled. As Cassandra, I would distract my mother and sister when they would lean hungrily over the Hermes handbag counter. "Daddy doesn't make that kind of money," I whispered to the counter tops.

When he was only fourteen years old, my father had been touted by the newspapers as the youngest freshman ever admitted to the ivy halls of his distinguished university. He had held his brilliant head up among older and sturdier freshmen in their beanies by playing cards like a wizard until the weary dawn, then going straight to classes and getting A's. By the time he was my father, he was playing bridge with Charles Goren and placing his bets on horses from fancy clubhouses. But his income as a lawyer was not adequate to the gambler he was becoming. Too soon, three teen-age children would displace him into middle age ("old age," if my brother was correct) when he would face bills for three college tuitions.

I adored my father. I have his shell-shaped ears, his even teeth, his long legs, and, like my father, I never needed anything fancy to make me feel alive. Like me, he mused on creation and destruction, everything and nothing, and so felt compelled to tease the syllables of language into poems. I think I had the only father in the neighborhood who, without getting hit by a car, could walk all the way home from the 6 o'clock train reading the New York Times without looking up. He was the only father coming home in his business suit on a sweltering evening before air conditioners who could turn the jump rope for us so that all the girls could jump double dutch. And surely he was the only father on the block bellowing out Rudyard Kipling verses from the shower in unabashed tunelessness.

****

I suppose we were nearly grown, the three of us, by that summer, and perhaps that made it easier for him to choose to exit the planet.

It was late August -- lazy and hot and a time to wrap up before autumn. My father was scheduled to arrive at the Philadelphia Airport from a meeting with Atlanta clients at 8 p.m. I had returned that afternoon from my summer camp job as waterfront counselor. My brother, just back from hitchhiking across the United States in preparation for writing The Great American Novel, was flinging his filthy stuff into the laundry room. My sister was due home in a few days from study in Mexico to share our room again.

At 11:30 p.m., after a date with my summer boyfriend, I bounced in the front door where my mother met me, an oddly familiar distraught look consuming her pretty face. Daddy had not come home. Yes, he had been a passenger aboard the plane, and no, there'd been no mishaps nor delays.

Then why wasn't he home yet?

My mother picked up the phone to call her closest friend, Lillian -- "Aunt" Lillian to us -- her fear visibly mounting. Pragmatic and level-headed Lillian counseled my mother to drive to the airport to seek more information. My mother turned to my brother, and they made the 45-minute drive together, leaving me behind. They had their mutual company and their joint mission as a defense to keep the mind in check. I remained stationary, the appointed guardian of the telephone, but my mind drove the road of every imaginable disaster. Daddy had fallen. Daddy'd had a heart attack. Daddy had careened off the road. Daddy had been abducted at gunpoint in some bizarre case of mistaken identity.

My mother and brother returned from the airport. Nothing.

It was late and too gruesome to contemplate a round of hospital calls since there was still the chance that toward dawn we would each hear from our separate rooms Daddy's footsteps bounding up the stairs and some rational explanation in the morning. Exhausted, we fell asleep, and while we slept, the rational world simply slipped away. Dawn brought only the jarring sound of the telephone with Aunt Lillian on the other end of the wires. My mother stood there like a wraith, her voice small and mechanical, the color draining from her face. My brother and I, having sprung from our beds to race for the phone, now clutched the doorway woodwork as if it could hold us up against hopelessness.

My mother turned again to my brother. Lillian would pick them up and the three of them would drive to the Airport Motel where my father was. I would follow twenty minutes later in the family car. There was no way to contemplate the meaning of this two-step. I dressed without knowing the clothes had touched my body. At last there was something for me to do, a clear directive, a move toward closure. Was I to brush my teeth as well as dress? I had twenty minutes. I brushed my teeth for all twenty.

As I got into the family car, I wondered what you call a family car if the father is dead.

Behind the wheel, I flicked on the radio to dispel the spectral and regain the ordinary. The DJ announced a song from "The Sound of Music." If I can sing, I thought, I'll be okay, I'll be steady. I opened my mouth so that Julie Andrews and I could have one voice. "Climb every mountain, ford every stream," her liquid power filled the car and rushed by my ears on its way out the window. "Follow every rainbow till you find your dream."

If he's dead, I said to myself, my mouth contrarily forming each syllable of the radio song, if he's dead, I'll find that dream and I won't let go. Why would he let go? Will somebody tell me why people let go? "A wonderful thing is the end of a string and will somebody tell me why people let go?" e.e. cummings was Daddy's own poet. Why would Daddy let go?

I remember thinking, "I can't see the road anymore. There are tears all over the road." But I kept on because the song kept on, croaking at the top of my lungs on the Schuylkill Expressway at 6:27 a.m. at 70 mph about finding the dream when I was speeding toward the nightmare, and I knew then that life would always be two things at once -- it would be hope and despair, alive and dead, joy in the climb and clinging to the dream right next to the choking sadness and madness of the final appointment in Samarra, my appointment with my father's destiny which was waiting at the Airport Motel. "Your father has been found."

*****

For years, I could not turn my head to the left as I drove past the airport, or I would have to see the Airport Motel. Even after they tore it down to build a bigger better airport, even without turning my head I would see the door to the motel room. The maid. The police. Aunt Lillian. Not my mother or my brother. Or my father. I never got to say good-bye. Perhaps this is yet another good-bye. . .

I barely remember the funeral. I don't know where I sat or who came up to me or even recall the casket. But I can remember my Uncle Murray because he looked like a taller and more --ing double of my father. At the cemetery, Uncle Murray's body shook with his sobbing.

There's Daddy, I conjured, rocked with sobs for someone who is being lowered into the ground. But who is that in the casket? That wasn't Daddy after all. Those were Uncle Murray's shoulders heaving uncontrollably for the loss of his little brother, my father.

What in an entire life could have prepared a young girl to give her own father to a cold and unforgiving earth? In Jewish tradition, the mourners "sit shiva" after the funeral. Like the Irish wake and the Jamaican Nine Night, this is supposed to be a time of rending garments in communal awareness of our short stay here, followed by a return to life. Our house, then, was open to family, friends, and people who were strangers to me. My father had died suddenly the day before, the tree of life had just uprooted, and I didn't want a single stranger in my house, the house of my father's footsteps and laughter. If they came, they would trample the garden of memory. I needed to tend that garden that was all I would ever have again of the man I loved best in all the world.

The normalcy of people's voices and their relentless coming and going and eating food and talking about food and their sudden silence if I came near impelled me away from the offenders and up to the solace of my room. We Americans are very bad at death. We need to rend garments together a little more, so that we can dance better together afterwards. The conspiracy of silence and the pervasive myth that death can be kept at bay are not good for the mournful ones. So I sat on my bed, mournful and alone.

Into that space came the rabbi from the synagogue. He sat down on my bed with me. Is it written in some commentary that a rabbi can simply enter? No doubt he thought he was comforting me when he told me that although my father was not an observant Jew (in fact, he said that my father was "not a good Jew" -- referring to my father's agnostic stance and his occasional attendance at synagogue), I (a "good confirmand") should come to services and not ignore the synagogue. In that moment, I understood why my father did not go to the synagogue.

My father, though he was a gambler and though he took his own life, knew more about loving kindness than this man of authority could ever hope to extend to the sufferer. So I answered the rabbi, to whom I previously had never said a disagreeable word. "My father was a very religious man; he had deep regard for all living things."

Yes, but. . . . The rabbi seemed to go on and on, bringing his pompousness so easily affected from the pulpit into the intimacy of my retreat.

When he left, I closed the door.

Soon, a gentle knock announced that Aunt Lillian was there. Always a devotee of this rabbi, she did not defend him when I cried, relating the story. Instead, she too began to cry, and I recognized that her tears were not merely for me or for my father; those tears were watering a long-ago pair of graves. She had been just thirteen, in a country in the throes of the Great Depression, when she was orphaned by her parents' double suicide.

"Did you forgive them?" I asked quietly.

"Yes," she said. "They couldn't help themselves."

At that moment, she ceased to be "Aunt" Lillian and became Lillian, my friend.

I had forgiven my father immediately. I am a born forgiver. With a sixth sense for others' pain, I knew that my father's hurt must have been so intense that there was no light, no windows to let in the light.

That night, I slipped into my brother's room. "Do you blame Daddy?" I asked.

He looked thoughtful and then said flatly, "No."

"Good," I answered. "Neither do I."

My father had taught me well about cosmic ironies -- laughter and tears and what twins they really are, separated by an invisible thread spun by a fragile silkworm. And he had taught me about compassion and forgiveness.

Yet I cannot say that in the years since his death I have seen much of that in response to suicide. Instead, there are labels and scorn. And fear. About the most the media has done is to give talk show time to survivors' rage, as if there were only one formulaic response to suicide. Indeed, I have met the ones who nurse their rage to keep it warm. But I think they have missed the message of the suicide and the chance to learn about loving.

"The rock," my mother always called my father. It was too large a myth for him to carry. No one is a rock. My father was just a man, clothed in his own particular humanity. The brilliant son and lawyer; the husband swinging my mother off her feet when he came home from the office and twirling her around and around, her 1950s skirts everywhere at once; the father who recounted fairy tales deep into the night to his spellbound children. This was my father at his best. And then there was the rest.

*****

This year I turned the age my father was when he died. I still do the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles in ink, just as my father used to do, and the pleasure I take as my pen makes its finishing strokes is like no other because it resurrects his concentration and erudition, and the way he sat in his green "daddy chair" finishing off an entire box of good chocolates and the puzzle in sweet synchronicity. I try to do something else I remember him doing. I listen very carefully when others speak because he always took the time to bend toward me and listen me. His answers revealed how delicately he had heard my lines -- and read between them. Small wonder that I now teach a course in interpersonal communication. I think that the phoenix that rises from the ashes is feathered in love, and that love takes wing and alights on those in need. . . .

My father's grave and my husband's grave are now side by side -- the two people who gave me the deepest love and the most joyful laughter of my life.

One thing I know about this journey we all make -- and it is not easy to distill experience and draw wisdom from it when there is enduring pain -- is that it is possible to have lost twice -- and still have been twice blessed.