Simply put, death is complicated.

I've felt many things in the 12 days since my father's death. Many, many things ranging from full and easy love to regret to longing to frustration to anger. There is no linear, stages-of-death pattern to any of it; at times I move through all of them and more in a span of thirty seconds.

But the moment my dad died and in the days following it---when we made it through the wake and the memorial and the spreading of his ashes---all I felt was the purest love and the deepest gratitude that Barry Mellow was my father and that I was born his daughter.

And it's from that place that my eulogy was born:

How do you do this?

How do you summarize this guy?

Dad...you really lived a life.

Nobody in this room can say they ever knew another Barry Mellow.

He wore his philosophies on his t-shirts:

“Kayaking is Life.”

“Question Authority.”

“The one who dies with the most toys wins.”

And then there was his baseball hat which read simply, “More balls than most.”

(He wore that hat to two of my sisters weddings.)

He wasn’t a guy to wear a tie----he was more the type to stay in his bathrobe all day---and while part of this had to do with his need to buck the system, part of it was that he just didn’t take himself or life too seriously.

That’s why he enjoyed himself so much...and in the end he took life for all it was worth.

It was very cool being Barry Mellow’s daughter and having a front-row seat to his life.

There just wasn’t another father out there like him. He juggled, he tap danced, he played the spoons. He introduced us to every type of music.

It wasn’t uncommon to come home and find Mambo music blaring in the kitchen---my mom and dad and a group of friends jamming along with a collection of instruments that only he would have hanging around the house---bongos, congas, sleigh bells.

My dad was an artist. Our house was always littered with brilliant doodles. Napkins, pizza boxes, envelopes---all of it his canvas. He made incredible papier maché masks. He worked with clay. He weaved wreaths together from branches he found in the yard. He whittled wood. At Halloween all of my sisters and I lined up to have our dad paint our faces with detail and artistry that no other trick-or-treaters could touch.

He taught yoga classes. He put tofu hot dogs on the grill long before anyone knew that they even existed. He made his own Chinese food.

He served us seaweed.

As kids, my sisters and I knew him as “the fastest man on the planet” because even running backwards we could never catch him.

And he always made sure his daughters knew how to think. He strengthened our brains with riddles and debate. He taught us to resist herd mentality. The lessons he imparted had little to do with practicality. He taught us life was short and that there were a million different ways to enjoy it.

He gave us three central pieces of advice:

---If you’re struggling to make a decision, choose the option that’s most fun.

---When you can...skip work. He’d say, “What will you remember more----another day of work or one in which you go on an adventure?”

---And he always fell back on the Yiddish proverb: People make plans and God laughs.

Never was this more clear than when, just a little over a year ago, he discovered he had a brain tumor.

When my dad got sick, I began interviewing him.

I wanted to learn as much as I could; he was my dad, but I recognized very young that he was a most peculiar and fascinating medley of a human being. I asked him about his timeline. About how his life led from Point A to Point B. About how he became the man we all knew him to be.

And what I soon realized was that he saw his life as one built from a sense of humor and curiosity...and also a series of whims and mistakes.

As a kid in Chicago, he was accidentally placed in an accelerated English class despite his poor grades. And when the school finally caught their mistake, he was already blowing the rest of the kids out of the water.

This, he told me, is how he learned he had a brain.

Later, a friend asked my dad to join him to take the medical college admission test. And when my dad nailed it, he decided---Eh, I guess I’ll go to medical school.

This is how he became a doctor.

He chose to do his residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan because an intern told him there were a lot of pretty nurses there.

This is how he became our father.

He met his pretty nurse.

When I asked my dad what the best thing he ever did in his life was, he didn’t hesitate: “I married your mom.”

And he loved recounting stories of their courtship:

At night he would whistle their song from the hospital balcony above her nursing school dorm so she could hear it through her window.

On rainy days, knowing that she would have forgotten hers, he stood outside the building, waiting to raise an umbrella over her head.

She taught him how to ride a motorcycle and he showed her Manhattan in that way that only Barry Mellow could.

The prettiest spots on the East River---he found ‘em. Pickle shops, the best spots for Chinese food; my dad had a knack for discovering treasures wherever he went.

My mom was a perfect and willing accomplice, barefoot and brave on their wedding day.

Eventually they made their way to Rhode Island and then came the five of us, his daughters.

People always asked him how he survived five daughters. And though he might have feigned suffering, we knew he loved being the father of girls.

He loved becoming a dad. He told me once that after they had Tara, my eldest sister, and my mom got pregnant a second time, he wondered how he could possibly love another baby as much as he loved the first. But when Becky was born he said it was like another chamber opened in his heart, filled with an entirely new kind of love. And that this happened with each kid that came next.

There was a song we were never allowed to play around the house. It’s called “The Man in My Little Girl’s Life” and it tells the story of a little girl who starts the song telling her father, “Daddy, there’s a boy outside, his name is Todd, he wants to play in our backyard. Can he daddy? Oh Please daddy?”

As the song progresses---and the girl ages and goes from calling him Daddy, to Dad, to Popsi---each new boy outside wants to do something else with her; carry her books, then take her to the prom and finally marry her. In the final verse she says, “Hi Dad, there’s a boy outside. His name is Ben. I told him Grandpa was going to babysit him.”

The song made my father weep.

But then he was always a crier, another thing we were grateful to have in a father. He taught us that crying was a good thing; a release...proof that you loved someone. He cried at movies. He cried when telling stories. He cried when a song was just too beautiful.

“I have something in my eye,” he’d say.

He loved being a father and later a grandfather. And all kids loved him because he was one of them.

One of my sister’s friends remembers sleeping over our house as a kid and being deeply homesick. My dad, trying to make her laugh, walked to the refrigerator, took out an egg and smashed it against his bald head, the yolk dripping down his face.

And of course she laughed.

He was also known for making kids laugh at the emergency room where he worked for over 30 years. Always a marker in his pocket, when a kid showed up in the exam room he would draw them a cartoon---a smiling elephant, a waving monkey with the child’s name in its thought bubble. He once filled all the walls of a pediatric exam room with his cartoons.

And it was always great for us to hear about the kind of doctor my dad was. For such a playful guy to have had such a serious job, it seemed like it shouldn’t work. But we always heard from so many people about what a wonderful doctor he was. I’d see letters from patients thanking him for taking such good care of them. Kids would draw him pictures. Co-workers told us how they trusted him with their own family members. He made house calls when that was no longer the norm and I’m sure more than one of you has been stitched up at our kitchen table.

But he was humble in this regard. He said the most important thing about being a doctor is being able to admit when you don’t know something. He would never let pride get in the way of taking care of a person.

Of course being a doctor was only his job and never his identity. When people asked him that age old question “What do you do do?” he would say, “I draw, I garden, I read.”

His life was never about his job. It was always about creating as much time as possible for play. And nobody played like my dad.

He bounced around on pogo sticks.

He pulled quarters out of people’s ears.

He explored New England by kayak, bike and cross-country skis.

And whatever he did, he approached it with a one-pointed focus and the goal of mastery.

If he was growing roses, they looked and smelled the loveliest.

When he took up shooting, he won awards for his marksmanship.

He was the best juggler.

The best whistler.

The best chess player.

His interests were infinite and his enthusiasm was infectious.

When you were with him you saw the world differently. He would say, “Let’s go for a ride,” and you’d hop in his car or later onto his motorcycle and you never knew where you were going or when you’d be back.

A town you might have passed through mindlessly became a magic place when visited with my dad. He would show you its loveliest views---the spots where cliffs meet ocean, a shore from which to watch a marvelous sunset.

I once wrote a paper in college about how being my father’s daughter showed me how accessible adventure and wonder are. I later learned that 30 years earlier my aunt Gail, my dad’s sister, had also written a college paper about the influence he had on her.

My dad was a guy to write about. A guy to examine.

Whatever he wanted to do, he did. And he did it well.

In truth, I think he took this same approach to death. For the majority of this past year my dad felt pretty well. He would say, “If you didn’t know I had cancer, you wouldn’t know I had cancer.”

And when he no longer felt that way, when he started declining---which really only started a couple of weeks ago--- he stopped treatment and died less than a week later with almost no struggle. Like everything else, he did it on his own terms. I think he would have described his death with a word he used to describe so many things--- “Interesting.”

And I think he would have been somewhat surprised and amazed by all the love which surrounded him in the moments of his last breaths.

I always got the sense with my dad that he couldn’t quite believe this was his life. Like its fullness---particularly in terms of love and family---had befallen him and was not of his creation.

Never, he would tell us, could he have predicted that his life would look as it did----a beautiful home on a river, a wife so loving and wise, a gaggle of girls.

And I think he wouldn’t have predicted that his last moments on earth would have looked as they did---each one of his daughters touching him, loving him fiercely...and eternally. For all that my dad knew he could get out of life, I don’t know that he ever knew he would get that.

You had it, Dad.

My parents’ deaths, just 17 months apart, will always be tied to each other now. They even died in the same room overlooking the river. I’m sure over time it will seem to my sisters and me that they died next to each other.

It’s fitting really---for all their bickering, it always seemed like they couldn’t live without each other.

I guess it was true.

Dad, I hope you are off on the ultimate adventure.

I hope when you got there that mom reached out her hand to you and said, “Hey Bar. Let’s go for a ride.”

I hope that you’re back on your motorcycle, mom’s arms around your chest and that the two of you are off laughing and chasing sunsets.

Give her a hug for us and enjoy the ride.