Rain, Death, and Other Lame Cliches

It was raining the day my father died, which is the quintessential manifestation of cliched imagery if you ask me. The difference between is and was becomes so great at the point of death that I think a better illustration would have been an earthquake--a gaping crack in the ground leading from my feet in Fultondale, Alabama to my dad's dead body in Murphreesboro, Tennessee. Or perhaps a tornado--a chaotic vacuum that aimlessly roams the earth, impersonally destroying a variety of personal items and lives that are unfortunate enough to fall into its predestined, seemingly random path.
Anything but rain. I've often thought that God could have done better than rain. Perhaps God was aiming for irony. When I was a baby, my familiy lived in Okinawa, where there was only one television station that had programming in the English language. Every night the station signed off with a song whose lyrics state, "I can see clearly now that the rain is gone." According to my parents' lore, if the TV set was left on at an audible volume come 2 AM, I would always wake up, searching for the song's point of origin. My dad died, the rain came, the rain is gone, and I cannot see clearly at the moment. And I'm still not sure where this song is coming from.