My father was a nihilist. Death was as meaningless as life, he’d always insisted, almost evangelically, and he was not afraid of it. When I was 8, he recited Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle!” soliloquy to me, uttering the last two words with an exuberant flourish—“Signifying nothing”—and most of the time his philosophy retained that over-the-top relish.
Daniel Loedel, “My Sister Was Disappeared 43 Years Ago” in the Atlantic













