This afternoon I’m heading to my step-grandfather’s funeral. It will be small and fanfare-free, just a few of us clustered in a narrow aisle of a Queens cemetery, saying our goodbyes.

In recent years, as Nat grew more feeble, more committed to a life spent in bed, I didn’t see him much. So I need to hold onto memories of him from earlier years–The man who always had a new joke from the Big Milton Berle Joke Book I gave him years ago. The man who never had a bad word for anyone. The man who unexpectedly reemerged from critical care wards of hospitals so often, we decided he really did have 9 lives.

He loved his family with all his heart. He loved my dad like a son. And he loved his wife so much, that when he outlived her–something no one thought possible, he simply lost the will to live, even as he did it for 3 more years.

I can’t think of anything more tragically, painfully, unfortunately romantic.

Nat was 93 and he went peacefully in his sleep; we couldn’t wish for a better way to go.

But I do wish that we were Heaven believers, because he’d want nothing more than to see his beloved again. I also wish that we could go around in a circle and tell jokes this afternoon instead of delivering a tearful euology. I think it’s how he’d want to be remembered.

In Nat’s honor, tell me something that’s made you laugh recently.