I actually wrote this earlier but didn't get to post it.
Its about the time we lost Dad.. We were all sitting around him. I was on the floor holding his hand.. Watching his breathing slow.. and slow… and stop.. and the whole room was dead silent.. I just rubbed his hand and closed my eyes and listened as he took a shallow sigh and was gone.. his whole body sort of.. twitched.. like his skin rippled for a ( Read more... )
I just realized this was when I lost my dad in 1999.
On July the 1st, I laid in his empty bed in his apartment because my brother insisted on taking the couch. Plus I nearly threw Dad's roommate across the living room. Who the fuck walks up behind a complete stranger and touches their shoulder? Dad said he was a private eye of some sort. Since Dad was a total nerd-geek but did not seem impressed, I guess this guy wasn't very interesting.
We had the wake on July 2nd. I touched his hand then. Clad in a lemon yellow knit vest, he looked odd with his sword against his leg, his hand still holding it.
It was cold. It shocked me.
On the 3rd we buried him. My uncle, his older brother, took me to a patch of land further down and showed me where their mother- the woman I take my name from - was buried.
There wasn't a tombstone nor marker.
My uncle said something along the lines of advisory regret.
But all I could think of was that my father was the last person to know exactly where my mother was buried in Tennessee. If she was buried. The family there doesn't use computers. The data would never be uploaded. Since these well to do Republicans never bought a tombstone for their own mother, I knew there wouldn't be one for my father unless I put it there.
The next day was the 4th of July. I celebrated amongst friends of my father and my little brother. I kissed a young man under the sweet magnolia tree. We had water gun fights. There was a picket fence. It was the slice of Americana one always hears about.
It was the best day of my life.
Maybe because it was so close to the worse.
I'm glad you're posting again.
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