Tomorrow... a time of balance... a time of memory
Tomorrow is the summer solstice... the time when day and night are balanced and then the scales tip and the days get shorter. It is odd to think of the days growing shorter and winter approaching when the heat of the year is just beginning. But, it shows ... even in the bloom of life, death is approaching.
Tomorrow is also the 2 year anniversary of my father's death day. i don't cry as much now, but in some ways i miss him more now than ever. We would often go for weeks or sometimes months without talking (especially in the summer when he and my stepmom would head to the Yukon Territory and our cabin on the lake for 4-5 months). But now, as it has been longer and longer since i last spoke to him... now it gets harder in different ways. i used to save up things to tell him - a funny story, a movie plot, a political event, something the kids have done - and then we'd have a 2 hour long conversation. Now, i find myself doing that still - but we'll never again have that 2 hour long talk on the phone. i think if we'd talked every day it would have hurt more then and be more bittersweet now... but because we didn't... it is as time passes i feel it more.
He wasn't a perfect dad. He had his broken bits, his grumpy bits, his personal preferences and visions of me that didn't match mine. He told others more often than he told me that he was proud of me, that he loved me. In my last visit, we spoke of our next visit but both of us knew deep down that our last embrace was probably the last time we would feel each other's arms and hear the sound of each other's voice. He wasn't perfect. Sometimes he was pretty miserable (the teen years were hard on us both). But, he did the best with what he had. And, in the end, so did i. And that is all we can ask of our parents. And ourselves.
Tomorrow is also the 2 year anniversary of my father's death day. i don't cry as much now, but in some ways i miss him more now than ever. We would often go for weeks or sometimes months without talking (especially in the summer when he and my stepmom would head to the Yukon Territory and our cabin on the lake for 4-5 months). But now, as it has been longer and longer since i last spoke to him... now it gets harder in different ways. i used to save up things to tell him - a funny story, a movie plot, a political event, something the kids have done - and then we'd have a 2 hour long conversation. Now, i find myself doing that still - but we'll never again have that 2 hour long talk on the phone. i think if we'd talked every day it would have hurt more then and be more bittersweet now... but because we didn't... it is as time passes i feel it more.
He wasn't a perfect dad. He had his broken bits, his grumpy bits, his personal preferences and visions of me that didn't match mine. He told others more often than he told me that he was proud of me, that he loved me. In my last visit, we spoke of our next visit but both of us knew deep down that our last embrace was probably the last time we would feel each other's arms and hear the sound of each other's voice. He wasn't perfect. Sometimes he was pretty miserable (the teen years were hard on us both). But, he did the best with what he had. And, in the end, so did i. And that is all we can ask of our parents. And ourselves.