The last episode ended with the actual death of my father and the events that happened to me were an exact replay of the precognitive dream that I'd had the night before. In the Wilt, Ike & Me book, a lot of things happen right after his death. He died on a Friday, and here is a quick look at what happened the very next night… Later that Saturday evening, right after sundown, we went over to the funeral parlor to view my father's body. It was just our immediate family.  When we got there, I tried to get mentally prepared. Just a few months earlier, I had stood next to my father, looking at my Uncle George's dead body. Now I would be looking at him. Uncle George was like a pasty wax figure. I couldn't imagine how bad my father was going to be. As we approached the plain, brown coffin. I got ready for the worst.  But when I looked in, I wasn't at all prepared for what I saw. He looked fantastic, and he seemed completely alive. His eyes were closed, but he didn't look dead. In fact, he didn't even look asleep. He had an animated expression on his face that I had seen a million times, like he had just gotten a great idea. He seemed ready to sit up and tell us about it. And he was sure we were going to love it. I couldn't stop staring at him. It was unsettling.  He just looked too good. Maybe it was because he had died suddenly and hadn't been sick. Or maybe it was because he'd been dead for less than a day. Or maybe the mortician was a genius with hair, makeup, and lighting. Probably all of the above. Whatever it was, it was a real shock. The only way you could tell he was dead was that he wasn't breathing. I was fine until we got home, and I walked into the kitchen. I looked at our table with the four chairs spread around it, in their usual positions; and I totally lost it. I ran into the hall closet and cried into the coats for a few minutes. Then I regained my composure and came back out. That started happening to me a lot. I always wanted to be alone whenever I felt like crying, which was often. There was something deeply personal about it, and I needed to shut off the outside world. This was just between me and myself. When we got back from the funeral home, a few people had gathered at the house. It was quiet and private, with only some immediate relatives and close friends. When I walked into the entrance hall, I was surprised to see Wilt sitting there. He was all alone, slumped over in one of the chairs, with his head in his hands. I couldn't handle the sight of him. It brought the whole thing home in a way I wasn't ready for. I ran into the bathroom and cried my eyes out for a few minutes. I'm pretty sure he never saw me. About ten minutes later, we saw each other in the hall and again, I couldn't take it. I turned, went into my parents' room and closed the door. When I came out and started walking down the hall, I could see him standing by himself, staring into my father's office where the two of them had spent so much time together. I turned around to walk back to my parents' room. I didn't think he had seen me, and I was sure that I was out of his reach. But, somehow, he stretched out his long right arm and wrapped his hand around my shoulder. As soon as he touched me, I broke up. He pulled me close and held me firmly against his side. I collapsed into him and started crying hard. He put his forearm against the wall, high above the doorway into the office, up near the ceiling, and buried his face in it. I could feel his body shaking with sobs as we stood there together. Then, from all the way up there, I heard his deep voice say, "Be strong, Davy. It's time to be strong." In the memoir, a few more things happen back at the house, and then the next afternoon, Sunday, December 5, 1965, was my father's funeral, which was held at Temple Sholom. For months, we had been focused on three big events, scheduled one Sunday after the next: the Bond dinner, the engagement party, and my mother's fiftieth. Now it turned out there was a fourth - his funeral. Of course, it wasn't on anyone's calendar. But nevertheless, here it was. It started out with a private viewing for family and friends in the synagogue lobby. It's against the religion to put an opened coffin inside the sanctuary, so the viewing was held out there. It was a bright day and the lobby was filled with sunlight. As I looked at him, he still had that same animated expression on his face. But it was a day later, and he was a day deader. It was a rough hour. As we stood next to the coffin, our family and close friends lined up to say goodbye. I watched as all the people I had known all my life, every single one of them, broke down in shock and grief at the sight of him. His aunts and uncles from the old country were crying and screaming in Yiddish, and two of them fainted. It was terribly painful. By the end of the hour, it was already the worst day of my life, and it hadn't even started yet. Finally, they closed the coffin and opened the sanctuary doors. They wheeled it into the synagogue and we followed behind. To my surprise, it was packed with mourners. We had been shut off and hadn't heard them come in. All the seats were taken and there was no place left to stand. According to the papers, about twenty-five hundred people surrounded the building outside as well. Maybe they had come to pay their respects, or maybe just to see the team. They had all walked in together and stood against one wall as a group. Wilt was in the middle, but he wasn't Wilt Chamberlain anymore. He was just another heartbroken soul, who had come to say goodbye to his dear old friend, really his second father. There was such an outpouring of grief, it took a while to get the place quieted down. Sudden death is a real killer. It adds shock to the sorrow, driving home the truth that no matter who you are, the end can come at any time… At the cemetery, the coffin was placed on a metal stand, over the open grave. The rabbi said a few prayers and then it was time for us to say the Mourner's Kaddish.  When the first word came out of my mouth, I remembered that only eight days earlier, I had been sitting with my father in synagogue and he had made me promise that I would do this for him after he died. I had completely forgotten about it. After we finished, the rabbi took a small spade, reached into a container of dirt, and put a pile of it on the coffin. "What are you doing?" I thought. "Don't do that. You're going to get it dirty." And then, it all really hit me. Until then, the whole thing had been like a show. My father was immaculately dressed and perfectly groomed, lying in this beautiful wooden box that was now resting on a shiny silver stand. They had bright-green artificial turf spread all around, so you didn't see any dirt or the other graves. It was all so clean. But now, the show was over, and it was time to get down to the real business at hand. They were going to take this pretty box with him in it, and bury it deep in the ground, under six feet of dirt. And that would be that. For the first time, I fully understood that he was really gone, and I was never going to see him again. Never again hear his voice, listen to his wisdom and counsel, hear him laugh or sense the nobility of his spirit. And I would never again feel his love and protection. Our time together was over. We had reached the end… A full week of mourning went by and then, it was time for me to begin the slow, inch-by-inch journey from catastrophe back to normal. But normal was a long way off. I went to school Monday morning and walked back into my everyday life. Everyone was extremely kind, and I had a ton of school work to catch up with, which helped divert my attention. But I was totally shell-shocked. As the routine of everyday life set back in, amazingly, everything was the same as it had been before my father died - same people, same school, same schedule, same life; it was all exactly the same. Except nothing was the same. And it never would be again. I played it brave, but the center of my world had been destroyed, and there was now a gaping chasm of grief in its place. I had to learn to walk around it, but I still fell into it several times a day, and it broke me apart every time. Finally, after about a month, a few small things slowly started bringing me back to life… Well, that's the end of this episode, and it's also the end of the sadder part of the story. The pace starts to pick up in the episode that's coming. So as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let's get together in the next one.     

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