A little late but what to do

It's a couple days late but I was not able to get to my computer until now so hear it is, a passage from one of my favorite books:

I shut my eyes and thought of him at my side, my hand in his trying to match his stride as I walked with him up the mountain above us, and I saw the splashings of water on his muscled whiteness as he stood in the bath, and the lamplight on his hands over the seat of his chair as he knelt in prayer at Chapel.

Air rushed from his throat and blew dust from his tongue, and I heard his voice and in that strange voice I could hear, as from far away, the Voice of the Men of the Valley singing a plain amen.

So I closed his eyes and shut his jaw, and held him tight to me, and his bristles were sharp in my cuts and I was heavy with love for him, as he had been, and with sadness to know him gone...
But you are gone now, all of you that, were so beautiful when you were quick with life. Yet not gone, for you are still a living truth inside my mind. So how are you dead... when you live with my as surely as I live with myself?...

Did my father die under the coal? But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy's red jersey over his coat, and coming in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother's hand, and look, and O, the heat of pride at the picture of the Queen, given by the hand of the Queen, in the Palace of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voices in music fit for a Queen to hear.

Is he dead? For if he is, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.
How green was my Valley then and the Valley of them that have gone.