Herbert Ewing Duncan, Jr., my father, age 10 in 1941.
Usually, I run interviews in this column with fascinating people that start with the same question: what are you most hopeful about and most fearful about for the future? Sadly, one of the most fascinating people I have known—my father—passed away before I got around to asking him my question. He died on Thanksgiving exactly one year ago today. So I’m starting this column with my father’s final words and what they might mean for a future that he will not live to see, but one that he and his generation helped to create.
In his lifetime, my father, born in 1931, lived through his own future as the decades went by and both hopes and fears played out for him personally, and also for our country, our species, and our world. A future that has manifested in our present-day to look very different from when my dad was young and pondering his hopes and fears about what was to come. He saw the fulfillment of many hopes that he and others imagined for their future. But he also saw certain fears manifest that troubled him until the end.
Yet hope remained my father’s touchstone, not fear, even as he understood how the tension between the two is the essence of being human. He also knew that those who hope need to be realistic about the power of fear to alter the future—and ultimately what this means for happiness.
I hope you enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend essay below. Some of you read an earlier version—the piece below is updated and edited for length.
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There was a stillness when my father died last Thanksgiving, his ancient face soft as a baby’s. I’m not sure what physiological process turned his skin from wrinkled and leathery to creamy white, but that’s what happened just before he half opened his still sharp, gray-blue eyes and muttered words that I had not expected. “I’m so happy,” he said, smiling and slurring the words, his cheeks already drawing into a stiff mask of death.
I didn’t understand what he meant, but I nodded and squeezed his hand anyway. This made his stiffening smile broaden just a smidge, smidge being one of several funny-sounding words that my dad used to amuse himself. He also liked to draw out certain vowels in words like “oak,” which he knowingly mispronounced as “o-ah-k,” and to add consonants to words like “wash,” which became “warsh.” In this was a hint of playfulness but also of query; a gentle poke to see how people would respond. Would they smile, being in on the joke, or pretend they didn’t notice?
Maybe my father saying “I’m so happy” was also him being wry and impish even at the end, muttering something that on the one hand sounded wonderful for a dying man to say, consoling to those of us left behind. But it also was incongruous given the heaviness and grief that hangs over a scene like this.
Hours later, deep into that cold November night, my dad slipped away to the sound of heavy silence and a faint hiss of air from an oxygen machine. Family and friends had mostly come to say goodbye, though not everyone made it as he slipped away more quickly than expected. Just a day earlier he had been up and still lucid. But now it was just me sitting with him watching the rise and fall of his chest until it grew still, a gentle finish as I stroked his unnaturally soft skin and his white hair. I kept a firm grip on his hand, a hand I had held when I was a tiny boy and never wanted to let go. “Oh dado,” I said, using one of my many nicknames for him, unable to believe he was gone.
Over the next days and weeks, I told and retold the story of these three words spoken at the end of my father’s 93 years. It comforted those who loved him and those he had never met as they offered awkward condolences. What I didn’t tell them was that a small, nagging obsession was taking hold inside me to understand what exactly my father was “so happy” about, a yearning that seemed to merge in my overactive mind into a desire to also ponder the era that we’re living in where happiness seems more distant and ineffable than ever.
Not in a daily sense, like when a four-year-old laughs, or we feel the gentle warmth of sunshine on our cheeks, but in how people around the world seem grumbly and unsettled right now, if not angry and terrified. Some for a good reason as wars rage, children go to bed hungry, immigrant children are put in cages, hurricanes ravage, and madmen gain ever more power over us. We doom scroll our tiny screens, fret about the price of eggs and avocados, and watch as zealots of mayhem decide it’s okay, even virtuous, to trash science and democracy, and to defund everything from Medicaid and cancer research to Meals on Wheels. Too many distrust everyone except maybe a podcaster or demagogue who has learned to channel their disaffection. Millions, we’re told by the former US Surgeon General, live in isolation even in cities and suburbs swarming with people.
*****
My father would have appreciated this leap from a single dying man’s mumbled words to the status of happiness among the 8.2 billion of us still alive. He taught me to be curious and sensitive to the ebbs and flows of how our inner worlds—our personal beliefs, hopes, fears, loves—link up and vibe with the outer world of families, friends, communities, countries, and humanity. He would have wanted to discuss what this meant in terms of happiness, to ask questions, to connect it to the news of the moment, which he had followed and opined on until the end.
This included the presidential vote held just 23 days before he died—his 18th election as a voter and the 23rd he had lived through. Dad was born in 1931 when Herbert Hoover was president, during some of the darkest days of our republic—a time to be truly terrified. It’s fair to say that the results of the 2024 election were not the reason he muttered: “I’m so happy.” On election night he said: “People are voting from a place of fear. I’ve seen this happen before, and it did not turn out well.” Dad would know given a life that included not only the Great Depression but the rise of fascism and communism, a world war, a cold war, and deployment of thousands of MIRVS carrying thermonuclear warheads.
If Dad had known about my quest, he might have suggested that I start with a definition for “happiness,” a seemingly simple word that turns out to be difficult to define. Happy as a word, a concept, an aspiration, a disappointment, a yearning that has been debated forever. Aristotle wrote about it. So did ancients from around the world. The Lakota Sioux word wokini means “a life of peace and happiness” and the 12th Century Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali wrote the “Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya-yi Sa'ādat), which emphasizes mysticism and devotion and the liberation of the soul from corporal matters. In English, “happy” comes from the Old Norse word hap, which means “luck, fortune, or fate,” and from the Old English hæpic, which means “equal”—the latter a curious etymology that perhaps explains why Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote about “the pursuit of happiness” being an inalienable human right equal to life and liberty.
Modern English dictionaries define “happiness” as being “content” or “satisfied,” with some adding “prosperous.” Others describe happiness as joy, but not, it seems, joy in the sense of unbridled, orgasmic ecstasy. Merriam-Webster lists “warm fuzzies” as a synonym for happiness. This seems apt for a man whose face had turned baby soft towards the end, although I’m not sure that Thomas Jefferson, Al-Ghazali, or the Lakota Sioux would associate happiness with “warm fuzzies,” a definition that my father would have savored and repeated like he did when saying o-ah-k and warsh—with a wry gleam in his sharp, blue-gray eyes.
If I was discussing this with my father right now, I can imagine him bringing up what the Buddha taught about happiness, which is freedom from suffering and cravings leavened with kindness and compassion. Not because dad was all that into Buddhism, but because he knew that invoking the Buddha would trigger a memory for both of us that would make us grin—one of those private remembrances of moments in our lives that we share with those closest to us and can summon in recall with a single word or phrase, like “the Buddha.” This memory refers to an autumn afternoon when I was about 14 years old when my Bohemian artist mother came home one evening and informed us over dinner that we were now Buddhists.
I can’t remember how we responded, but this wasn’t the first time my mother had made such pronouncements. Like many young people in the 1970s, she was rebelling against the organized religion she grew up with and was exploring various pathways to fulfillment—or were they pathways to happiness? Rejecting our family’s ancient adherence to Protestantism, which she considered judgmental and dull, Mom also plunged into EST, astrology, shamanism, animism, and Tarot, among others. She read Joseph Campbell and Carlos Castaneda. My dad, brother and I indulged this with the same attitude that made us smile at “smidge.”
Some of Dad’s favorite pieces of my mother’s prodigious artistic output were hanging on the walls around him as he died. A vivid woodblock print of a sunset on the edge of the prairie in eastern Kansas where I grew up; a tongue of violent red fire rippling across an otherwise sedate stretch of bright green prairie grasses painted in oil; and a self-portrait of my mother in a Navajo dress wearing a frightening ritual mask from West Africa, a silk screen of a black and white photo tinged in almost imperceptible blues and pinks that she titled “My Inner Soul.” This work still haunts me as it lays bare what my mom seemed to believe was something hideous lurking deep inside her, a murky shadow self that she normally hid underneath her outward-facing beauty. That my father wanted this image near him when he was dying suggests deep currents in his mind about a woman he loved profoundly but I think at times struggled to understand.
“My Inner Soul,” Patricia DuBose Duncan, photo and silkscreen.
My mother could be delightful and charming and then suddenly go dark and become difficult, like she was angry with the world. But she also taught me through her art and activism to be passionate and authentic as a creative, and to question everything. Mom and dad met at Washington University in St. Louis in 1953, when she was learning art and he architecture. A year later they were married. It lasted for 67 years, until mom died at age 89, three years before my dad.
Countering “My Inner Soul” was a favorite of my dad’s from early in his marriage, a woodblock print by my mother that shows a row of gray, slanted Japanese rooftops in splashes of yellow, gray, blue, and green, the view from my parent’s tiny house in Sasebo, a port city in southern Honshu where they lived in the mid-1950s when my dad was a Lieutenant JG at the US Navy base there. Sasebo is where my mother and father fell in love with the simple, elegant, understated beauty of Japan, a look and feel that I grew up with in the Japanese-inspired house that my father later designed for us in Kansas. Not long ago, I found a stash of my parent’s love letters they wrote in Japan when dad was at sea—so many urgent cursive words like “darling” and “missing you terribly.” Unlike many children who can’t imagine their parents in passionate love, I knew there a soul-deep bond between my mom and dad that seemed mysterious but comforting.
As I write this in a different century and far into the future after many of these events occurred, it's unfathomable to me that these two people, so vital and passionate, and the world they lived in are now gone forever—though not entirely. Since my three children were born—they are now adults—I’ve seen my dad’s waggish sense of humor passed on to them as an obvious ancestral trait. Lately, we’ve marveled how my exuberant four-year-old grandson also flashes my father’s mischievous smile and that all too familiar gleam in his sharp, blue-gray eyes.
Mom and dad returning home from Japan in 1957.
As my quest continued, I turned to more recent philosophers who pondered happiness, including many modern-day thinkers who associate it like Jefferson did as the pursuit of happiness, which seems to me a distinctively American approach involving a near-obsession with achieving things, to always be striving for success, to these days buying the coolest shoes worn by influencers on Instagram, pursuits that for many in my country and elsewhere have become equated with happiness. I personally have believed so completely in this hell-bent pursuit that in 2007 I wrote an essay for Wired magazine called “Down with Happiness,” by which I meant happiness as an end to itself as opposed to the pursuit of happiness. This being Wired, the context for this intentionally provocative title was a worry about technologies being contemplated then and now that are trying to deliver a kind of permanent happiness in a pill or through bionic implants in our brains. But the message was clear: that to truly achieve a state of blissful happiness by whatever means would be to give up one’s ambitions and possibly our agency if a permanent bliss replaced our dreams to create and build things, to want something better for our children, to overcome adversity. It might even be the end of our civilization.
And where did I learn to think like this? From my father of course, and my mother, both of whom were relentless about doing, on embarking on big, challenging projects, on painting and designing, on accomplishment. My mother also liked to be pre-Instagram fashionable starting with Fifties Beat black turtlenecks and skinny jeans in her twenties followed by a pill-box hat period where she emulated Jackie Kennedy, and finally with those Navajo dresses trimmed in silver and turquiose jewelry and knee-high boots. My dad wore khakis, hush puppies, and corduroy architect’s jackets with elbow patches pretty much his entire professional life.
When I was growing up, my dad was consumed with his work as an architect. He designed award-winning buildings—hospitals, museums, office buildings, high rises, and houses, many in his distinctive, Japanese-infused style—and became a national figure for a time in the 1970s as a leader of the American Institute of Architects. My mother was constantly in the throes of her art and environmental activism, which among other things led to a book of photographs and poetic text titled Tallgrass Prairie: The Inland Sea, about this extraordinary ecosystem that she loved, a stretch of land that once to stretch from Mexico into the interior of Canada. In 1996, she worked with US Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) and others to create by act of Congress the Tallgrass Prairie National Reserve near Strong, City, Kansas.*
These pursuits kept my mother and father busy most of the time, with my father often working himself to exhaustion. Yet I remember having fun and laughing, too. And somehow my dad was always there when I most needed him.
*****
After my brother and I grew up and were approaching middle age, my father sold his KC architect’s office. He and my mother, then in their 70’s, moved to Maine to be close to my brother and his family, but dad kept working. I was sure he would never stop— but I was wrong. Not long after they moved something I thought was inconceivable happened. Dad began to let go of his drive and ambition. He stayed busy in their small house in Rockport and later in Topsham, Maine. He continued to do small design projects, but he announced that he was satisfied with what he had accomplished in life, a curious and unexpected transition from a man so dedicated to the pursuit.
This blush of tranquility didn’t last long. Around 2008 my mother put down her paint brush literally one day in the middle of a work in oil of the woods near their house, a painting that hauntingly sat for years on her easel, forever unfinished. She already had been showing signs of a slow, heart-rending slide into dementia that consumed my father’s time for the rest of their lives together. My father’s health soon began to suffer, too, as a collapsing spine and a not entirely successful back surgery landed him in a wheelchair. He endured bouts of an autoimmune disorder triggered by stress—there was a lot with my mother—that several times put him in Intensive Care.
During these dark days my father lost much of his humor and equanimity—his wokini, as the Sioux would say. Yet he retained a fierce devotion to my mother, despite her prickliness and the challenges of tending to her. Worse for him was my mother’s refusal even in her dementia to give up the pursuit. As her mind failed, she became angry and desperate to write and paint, to show her work, to regain the recognition she had earlier in life. Dad anguished over why my mother couldn’t, like him, be satisfied with what she had accomplished. “Why can’t she just let it go?” Dad would say, looking, at times, like he was going to cry.
When my mother died in 2021, I thought my father would quickly follow. Instead, I was stunned to see him recover his verve, curiosity, quirky smile, and interest in those around him. Now in his early nineties, his health stabilized, and he remained reasonably robust with hints of frailty. But his mind stayed crisp and probing and, as his good humor returned, he became at turns wise, wry, and silly.
Dad didn’t give up on doing things and having projects, and spending time with neighbors who would drop by to visit and hear his stories and to share their own comings and goings. He wrote books about his life in the Navy and as an architect, and a biography of my mother, a final act of love and devotion. But unlike his architecture, which my father pursued with intense ambition, he wrote these tomes and had them published at a local printer’s shop in Maine purely for himself and anyone in the family who was interested.
For three years after my mother’s passing, the family got back the best of my father, liberated from anguishing over my mother. I became his caregiver of a sort, as much as I could do from two hours’ drive away in Boston and amidst my own projects and ambitions and pursuits. I called him nearly every day and delighted in our conversations. For two more years it became a ritual for me to visit my dad as often as I could. I wasn’t happy he was alone in the house in Maine most of the time, but this was his choice. I worried he would be lonely, even as he swore he was not.
Gradually, I realized this was truly what he wanted. For him this was a kind of liberation, as the philosopher-travel writer Pico Iyer once wrote, from “ceaseless striving”—a state of mind and of living that was so distinct from my mother. She died feeling unfulfilled, a disposition undoubtedly amplified by the dementia but had always been part of her core being. She couldn’t let go of a desperate pursuit of… what? More accomplishment? Attention? Happiness? I ask this not only about my mother, but about myself—and about that hell-bent pursuit of happiness that at this moment in our society, particularly in America, that seems to be such a palpable yearning.
When I wrote my “Down with Happiness” essay in Wired and gave a full-throated endorsement for the pursuit of happiness, I was not wrong. Wanting to accomplish something is why billions of people now have a place to live, electricity, automobiles and, yes, avocados and skinny-leg jeans, even if tariffs and the machinations of global politics are making them crazy expensive and despots are trying to undo the engine of innovation that powers modern life. What I didn’t fully grasp is that there is a time for the pursuit and a time for not sweating definitions from Aristotle or Al-Ghazali, for savoring and being grateful for moments of contentedness and warm fuzzies.
A few months before the end, Dad finished his last book and was thinking about another one but didn’t get to it. He started to gently tell me that he was tired and was ready to go. This was when I had some of my best moments with him, sipping a glass of wine in his living room and endlessly talking. On his 93rd birthday his then four-year-old great grandson James visited him, and both of their sharp, gray-blue eyes beamed as they chatted, one voice high and melodic, the other gravely. They played with Batman action figures (belonging to my dad) and they laughed. My father, I think, literally became for a moment four years old again and was as happy as anyone will ever be.
*****
Two weeks before he died, dad was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure, which he seemed to recover from only to fade soon after returning home. The end was swift as his face took on that odd ivory pallor and he slipped in and out of consciousness. But he did revive long enough to mutter his words about happiness.
I will never know exactly what he meant, but I can surmise after my quest a theory—that in those last three years dad had finally lived exactly as he wanted: alone with his memories but with friends and loved ones nearby; and with his projects done, including those that he had done for himself and no one else. He had freed himself from the burden of constantly wanting more, of worrying about elections and little screens streaming war, greed, and heartbreak, and a world tilting sideways—of a yearning to find happiness.
Dado died with that baby-like calm etched into his face, so unlike my mother’s death face, which sadly was one of agony like she didn’t want to let go, like she still had things to do. Her passing reminded me of a Dylan Thomas poem, one of her favorites:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I understand this compulsion to deny and to do epic battle against the end when the pursuit is still hot to the touch. But I think I know which face, my mother’s or my father’s, that I hope to have when I’m dying, though I can’t be sure which it will be. I have elements of both my mother’s unrequited ambition and my father’s determination to achieve that eased into equanimity and humor and an almost eerie calm. I wonder, in the end, if I’ll be able to set aside the rage against the coming of the night and be able to say from deep inside me as I die: “I’m so happy.”
After my father passed, I didn’t want to call the funeral home. I sat in silence with my father in his room filled with my mother’s art and memories. But eventually I did make the call as the first light of dawn on Thanksgiving Day lit up the windows and illuminated the images on the walls. When the funeral man came, fiftyish and wearing an awkward-fitting suit, he had a look of practiced condolence and asked if my dad was a veteran. I said yes. He pulled out an American flag as I took one last look at my father’s baby-like face in the plastic body bag. After the funeral man zipped it shut, he solemnly draped the flag over my father’s body.
Dad was proud of his time in the Navy, but he wasn’t big into this sort of pageantry and I’m sure he would have smiled wryly at this heroic warrior touch at the end, his blue-gray eyes sparkling. But it seemed to make the funeral man, himself a veteran, happy—at least for a fleeting moment, which in the end is all any of us can ask for.
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*My essay about my mother, her art, and environmental activism is titled Silent Spring at 60: My Mom and Rachel Carson, in Medium.
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From My Archives
Down with Happiness
DRUGS. IMPLANTS. VIRTUAL reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?
By David Ewing Duncan, Wired, 2007
In the Declaration of _Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed a universal right to the pursuit of happiness. The key word there is pursuit. Jefferson thought that people ought to be free to chase after happiness; whether they attained it was their own business. In the 18th century, the technology to get happy despite circumstance or personality did not exist. Now, though, it's on its way — and that's not as delightful as it sounds.
What constitutes happiness? Freedom from worry? Or maybe contentment? A good definition remains elusive despite decades of neuroscience and psychiatry. Many researchers today have come to think that people have affect set points and that some of us are naturally happier than others. In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level. Like Jefferson, Csikszent mihalyi understands that pursuit, and not outcome, is what's important. Being reductionist about happiness doesn't mean it isn't fun, in all its myriad forms — free-floating rapture, blissed-out contentment, ecstatic partying. It's just that as a species, we generally keep these experiences in check. After all, the ways to induce them — alcohol, drugs, OK Go concerts — have historically come at a high cost.
We're entering an age in which technology may allow us to produce pleasant sensations all the time…
Thanks for the remembrance and how meaningful it is on this holiday.