Listen to more stories on the Noa app. I n 1979, five months after my seventh birthday, my father crashed his plane into an orange grove and died. Dad, a pilot, had gone up in one of his twin-props with a friend and lost control after some sort of mechanical failure occurred in the skies above Central Florida. The funeral was closed casket--an uncommon thing for Catholics back then--because my mother did not want people to see the work the undertakers had to do to stitch my father back together. So I never did get to say that last goodbye.