This is where the blog pivots for a moment. My health is good. I’ll see Dr. L in a couple weeks for the first time in six months and then will return to posting about health and cancer.
For now I want to write about my father.
My dad died two-and-a-half weeks ago but this feels like the first week without him. We buried him last weekend and in the days leading up to the funeral, we were all so busy with the logistics of deconstructing a life 89 years in the making that it felt like he was still with us. But this week, in the calm after the chaos; in the return to quotidian life after the abrupt disruption; in the gradual lifting of the fog, I feel his absence acutely.
I feel his absence in the stories I read. I feel it in the places I walk. In the food I eat. In the music I hear. In the trivial happenings of my family life, my work life, my life that I want to share with him.
I feel his absence I in the myriad mental notes I make to tell him next time I talk to him. But there will be no next time. And I desperately want to talk to him one more time.
Many more times.
This is the first post I will publish where I won’t talk to him in the days following with a conversation that begins: “I read what you wrote...”
We were lucky. Both our parents lived well into not only our adult lives, but also their grandkids lives. They left countless memories and an imprint of themselves; their personalities, behaviors, idiosyncrasies - all firmly in our minds and hearts.
The challenge, I think, as we grieve, as I grieve is to turn the absences we feel into presences, and to feel that presence in all that we do.
