He Would Have Been 62 Today

well, yesterday, 9-9-10.

I don’t think you ever really get over losing a parent. Today is dad’s birthday. It’s been three months since he passed away. We have reached some semblance of normalcy, our footsteps now echo of moving on. But I can’t say, just yet I’m over it. Because dad’s absence is almost often, and immediately felt.

Take for instance the sudden quiet in laughter, where his smart-aleck comments used to be; the sudden uninterrupted peace I now have  whenever I sit myself in the most coveted part of the bed, which is really, legitimately his; the extra shade of character that not only allow this gang of personalities, farmed together by chance, to stand strong as a family, and to seem as special as the Tenenbaums, but a character that completes them; a cold quiet accompanies me now, where once dad’s chuckle of sarcasm was all was needed to cushion life’s blows.

But as life keeps us busy, and as deadlines keep us busier, his death keeps us the busiest. There is the paper work for one, and the duty to country his death is required to serve. There is suddenly a lifetime’s worth of clutter to clean. And there is the slow accumulation of things: You give yourself a little reward for surviving his death, another because it’s on sale, and yet another, still in the hopes of it filling the void.

But the thing nobody tells the bereft, the thing self-help books leave out, or the stuff well-meaning friends who’ve known such a loss manage to forget, is that along with the fading of this hurt come the fading of dad’s presence. The further you move away from the pain, the farther you move from the time when he was alive.

Sometimes I don’t know if I want to forget. Other times I don’t know if I want to remember. It doesn’t get any easier. But three four months on and I think it’s true what they say: You do get better at it, at handling such loss, at handling such hurt, at handling yourself.

It’s as though his death has left this gaping hole in front of me, a space especially for life to especially pass through, a room especially for love to grow.

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