What my father’s death tells me about silence and ego.
It happened at the end of a violent year. A gentle human died.
2025 has been in dire need of the gifts of my father - those of pause, patience and politeness. It was a year characterized by impatience, panic and belligerence. Be it tariffs, AI or the endless bloody wars - we fought, we agonized but ultimately pushed our problems around the plate, finishing where we began. We were the best example of what Buddhists refer to as ‘unconscious living corpses,’ grasping impulsively for the unattainable or fleeing from the unknowable in the mindless quest for safety through permanence
But death has no time for permanence - very much like Japan, which is where I was when I heard. On the last day of a 15 day marathon around that country my sister called to tell me that my father had passed. While he’d been immobilized by a particularly aggressive stroke months earlier, it wasn’t entirely expected. That I was in Japan felt like an important message though. A country that manages to uphold near total silence and civility even in the largest, most densely populated city in the world. My father didn’t communicate clearly while alive, but in these two weeks of silence I’ve felt his signal grow stronger.
In ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ Joan Didion observes that humans are quick to assign meaning from synchronicities at a loved one’s passing, but the fact I’d voraciously consumed all that Japan could feed me on manners, patience and silence feels noteworthy. In many cultures, especially Buddhist ones like Japan, the skills of the deceased are believed to pass to the offspring at the moment of death. My father was the sole member of my family in possession of the traits I’d witnessed in Japan, where meaning lives in the gestures, silence and spaces between words. He was a quiet observer in a world full of words. So I’m unashamedly taking this as the first message from him: We all need to stop talking. In fact, perhaps it’s because I was in a country that builds aesthetics around quietness that his silence could finally speak to me.
It’s also common for the bereaved to look for cosmic meaning in numbers and timings - as though through creative calculation we might tweak reality. Didion documents how, using magical maths, she obsessively accumulates medical data, dates and ascribes special meaning to anniversaries (including the ‘year’ in her book’s title). Like Didion, I attempted to exploit the timezone difference to delay his death. If my location could shift its date by one day why couldn’t we shift the date indefinitely?
Beyond my mental manipulation attempts with time zones, I continue to find (or need to find) the timing meaningful. My father inhabited a household that resembles 2025. Full of egos, opinions and emotions. It prized articulation, rhetoric and even aggression. My father possessed none of these, so was consigned to the bottom of the hierarchy. Despite being a large man, his clout was small. Even his surname - my surname - held lower status than my mother’s maiden name throughout my childhood. To be accused of being a Jenkins was a demotion. I still wince slightly today when someone ‘accuses’ me with it.
I now see my family as a distillation of the West’s values since The Enlightenment. Ego, action and vocalization. It is a world in stark contrast to the one I discovered in Japan (note: I wasn’t exposed to Tokyo’s work culture), and it’s not the world of my father who was quiet, patient and only spoke when necessary. He didn’t win the argument, nor did he care to. As a teenager I mistook this for weakness and disinterest and this was heartily sanctioned by my mother whose 40 year propaganda campaign rendered him less than I now realize him to be. Perhaps it demanded a second half of life perspective and a nudge from ‘the Japans’, but I now see a form of heroism. I’m not about to peddle some schmalzy, ‘go dad, you were my biggest hero’ tribute. He wasn’t. To my mind, heroes moved things, starting with themselves. They didn’t sit on lawnmowers or behind hardback books on the margins of the real action. But to maintain such stoic silence and resilience in the face of a contrary set of family values takes a truck load of strength. So, in his final silence his heroism is speaking with volume and clarity. He was T.S Eliot’s ‘Still point of the turning world.’ The only place in a kinetic household where stillness occurred and awareness might exist.
His next message comes from one of the books he lived in. When, exactly 30 years ago (another neat number) my father’s mother died, he began reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I’d never discussed this with him, and may have not been satisfied by any discussion with his living self anyway. But I decided to pick it up to retrace his steps and attempt some form of dialogue through them. It turns out it’s not as much about death as how to live in a more mindful state of acceptance - especially of life’s impermanence. We’re offered daily reminders of death (and rebirth) through the mini deaths that occur - from the seasons to waves on an ocean. But only those equipped with awareness can truly cope with what is a nightmarish scenario to the rest of us. Not only do I believe my father had some of this acceptance, but he’d been trying to pass it on for decades. I just hadn’t heard, because we didn’t speak the same language.
My father seemed ill at ease with verbal communication. Recently I’ve spent some time learning about Autism Spectrum Disorder, and while I could never retroactively attempt any real diagnosis, a mild form of its key traits were present - including an undue focus on mechanical details that others see as peripheral, a preference for ‘playing alone’ and an inability to communicate with others. Before these traits cued autism they were more commonly associated with poor fathering - especially by an ill-informed family. And being non-verbal in such a verbal family was a special kind of sin. But I’ve learned that, for those on the spectrum, communication thwarted in one channel will invariably find new ones. My father was a professional photographer which not only provided mechanical objects to play with and plenty of time alone, but a medium through which he could declare his perspective. This week I’ve unlocked something I’d never stopped to notice before by sitting with his personal photographs. In my own silent conversation with them I’ve seen how and what he was silently studying - from the distant monkjack among the blossoms , to the way the snow transformed his garden, all the way through to his family - from which I can now see, he was anything but detached. While we engaged in debate and one-upmanship he was watching. And while it may not have been verbalized he was wholeheartedly and mindfully in the conversation with us. As I look through his pictorial commentary on us, his presence gets stronger and his voice louder.
We used to chastise him for opening a new conversation three chapters in without giving us any context - expecting us to simply understand. I now realize that, in his mind, he believed he was making perfect sense as the ideas were clearly formed in his own head. One confirmation of this was from the last conversation I ever had with him. For whatever reason I slipped in a rare "I love you” at the end. So rare, in fact, that I don’t think I’d uttered it since childhood. Even in his stroke-induced slurred state he was quick to pick up on it, telling me how he regretted never having said this to his own father. We discussed this for a little while and I waited for the phrase to be returned. It wasn’t in words, yet I reported to my family that it had as I had felt it so clearly in his intentions. Somehow I just knew. When I spoke about this to my mother after his passing she told me that, not only had he gone into that conversation committed to saying it, but he also reported that he’d done so. He felt it, I believed he’d said it, despite never putting it into words. Perhaps this was how he was communicating all along.
I have grown op a product of the ideology of The Enlightenment - prizing reason, empirical data and rationality above all. The unintended consequence of this can be a lack of awareness of the beautiful or the spiritual. What if we don’t know something rationally? What if we don’t do something? What if we are idle? What if it doesn’t take words? If eastern cultures have it right and there is nothing physical, or permanent then we have nothing but our minds and our ideas. So, rather than laboring to accumulate all this mindless matter, perhaps it is time to nurture the mind and our capacity for ideas - because everything else simply dies anyway.
I can count on my hands the verbal wisdom that my dad imparted, but one is very relevant to this moment. About 5 years ago he said that he felt sorry that I didn’t get to experience all that the late 20th century gave him. He got to fly planes, sail boats and sport leather driving gloves for his convertible cars in the 70s. I protested by saying that our values and desires had changed and I felt no poorer for what I had access to today. But I now feel like he was alerting me to the end of something, because I think the 20th century may have died this year, along with my dad. We lost a roll call of icons. Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Dianne Keaton, Val Kilmer, Ozzie Osbourne and Jane Goodall defined their era, which lauded ego and action. These figures physically embodied the ideas they birthed - Sundance Kidness, bat-eating heavy metalness, ape-loving conservatism and dashing wing-man-ness. The expiration of these towering symbols of solidity delivers a powerful blow to the idea of permanence. They’ve gone. They don’t live in our world anymore and we don’t live in theirs. Perhaps it’s time to define the world that we do live in. That 2025 felt like a year where action exhausted us is perhaps a signal of our maturity and readiness to move beyond simple action heroes and ego.
As I reach this conclusion, a kind of clarity descends over me and the nihilistic stage of grief begins to lift. There is purpose in death. Like in crop burning, it is there to nourish the soil for new growth. But only if you’re ready for it. The nourishment that I want to take from this is that we’re not only ready for a post 20th century worldview but we may also be ready to shed some of our supposed Enlightenment fallacies. Might we move from a 300 year moment that framed progress as linear, rational and action-obsessed to one that values cycles, emotion and quiet reflection? A society that regards humans, not just as thinking minds, but as feeling, connected bodies too. I’d go even further to say that, in its zeal to separate the dogma of the church from societal progress, The Enlightenment’s foot soldiers perhaps accidentally pushed aside the study of our inner, quieter worlds. And we need this now desperately.
2025 will be seen as an historical hinge point. The year that generations of ideology broke. USAID, NATO, even Western democracy are being tested. Pushed to their limits by the mindless motive of efficiency, humans either checked out, burned out or were kicked out. Society seems out of sync with the endless striving for outward progress now. The malaise or anxiety we’re feeling should be interpreted as a good thing, as it’s a call to the next phase of inner exploration and it requires some letting go of the last. In his living patience and civility, as well as his ultimate silence, I now see that my father was showing me how to do this.