It has been a long year.
Shortly into the new year my dad died from complications of a fall. I was completely unprepared for the way that would change my life.
It wasn't just the sadness of grief (though losing grandparents had not prepared me for the grief of losing a parent). It was all the changes that this created in the family of origin as we re-organized to take care of our Mom and still maintain our lives (only one of us lives remotely near her). It was all the travel back and forth, to the hospital, then staying for the funeral, then back to help Mom deal with his stuff. It was recognizing that our relationship was fixed forever It was discovering things about Dad that I had known but never named until I had to consider and define him for other people.
Let me say upfront that I am an oldest child and the daughter of a man who was an only child, and that I have always known that we had a close relationship. Yes, I was Daddy's Girl. But as long as our relationship was open ended, it was still in flux. Once it was closed, finished, I was compelled to examine it and make some judgements about it. I don't think I failed my dad, but I do wish I had played more with him. It was only in retrospect that I realized how playful he was himself.
We always lived 300 to 800 miles apart ever since I graduated high school, so he was never a constant presence in my adult life, and yet I am painfully aware of missing him -- Father's Day was very hard. His birthday this week looms over me like a thundercloud waiting to burst open. My one relief about Christmas is that for the first time in 20 years or so we were all together last Christmas, Dad's favorite holiday. I am inexpressibly grateful that we all made the effort to be together, and that we could share that with him on what became his last Christmas.
Since I was 40, I have understood, in the core of my being, that I am a finite being and that I will die. But somehow I never really comprehended that the people I love will die. And in the last year I have lost a number of dear people; this has not only made me appreciate the people I love, it has deepened my gratitude for the days I have with them. I think more and more often of the verse from Psalms - (I'm paraphrasing here) "God give us the grace to number our days." -- not to let them fly by unheeded, uncounted, undistinguished, but to count them, to savor them, and the people who fill them.
