As the World Turns
I knew coming into 2012 it would be a year of changes. It started slow, but they're coming on. But, this post is more about my feelings regarding my father's death.
I think we all have a few, perhaps a half-dozen, people we set our life's pole stars by. It's not a matter of agreeing, but of having signposts, navigation markers, a sense of how to measure where you stand in life. In my case, my father was the last of those.
So. With his passing, I must measure myself against... myself. Finally, in some sense, I'm grown up. It's a more than a little disorienting. I can no longer stop over and watch the Yankees. Or argue about politics or society. Or listen to him recall his youth, and in those discussions understand a little more about me, and my place in the world. Instead, if you'll pardon the pun, I'm now navigating life by dead reckoning. Just me and my sense of action. That sense is a result of how I understood my polestars, but it's still just me. It's a little lonely, a trifle frightening, and, comma, sad.
I've understood, grokked if you will, personal mortality for a long, long time. But this is not mortality, this is life without a mental safety net. I don't know how better to describe it.
I have more to write, but it will have to wait.
I think we all have a few, perhaps a half-dozen, people we set our life's pole stars by. It's not a matter of agreeing, but of having signposts, navigation markers, a sense of how to measure where you stand in life. In my case, my father was the last of those.
So. With his passing, I must measure myself against... myself. Finally, in some sense, I'm grown up. It's a more than a little disorienting. I can no longer stop over and watch the Yankees. Or argue about politics or society. Or listen to him recall his youth, and in those discussions understand a little more about me, and my place in the world. Instead, if you'll pardon the pun, I'm now navigating life by dead reckoning. Just me and my sense of action. That sense is a result of how I understood my polestars, but it's still just me. It's a little lonely, a trifle frightening, and, comma, sad.
I've understood, grokked if you will, personal mortality for a long, long time. But this is not mortality, this is life without a mental safety net. I don't know how better to describe it.
I have more to write, but it will have to wait.