Dear Dad ...

Today is six months, Dad ... Six months since you left us, taking a huge chunk of what made us a family away with you. To say I miss you would not do the pain justice. To say there is an emptiness is just not descriptive enough to capture the void your death has left. The morning you died is as fresh as if it were this morning, the rasping breaths you took as horribly penetrating in my mind as they were in those final minutes of your life. If I had been a braver soul, I would have held your hand as you passed from this realm. But I could not bear to look upon you in your pain, and I could not handle that sound, a sound that haunts me to this day. I hope you can forgive me for that. I am trying to forgive myself.

You are with me in spirit each day, Dad. Especially when I tend to your lawn. I picture you as a bobble-head, bouncing along on the front of the tractor. You scold and swear and scowl just as you always did, a cantankerous old man with a penchant for ticking everyone off. Oh, how I miss that. I would love to have another Friday-night showdown over politics, to leave your home swearing that that would be the last Friday night dinner I would ever sit through and allow you to get to me like that.

Which one of those dinners was the last one? Which Friday marked the very last Friday night we would spend in that way? I missed it, never celebrating its solemnity as the. very. last. one. It came and went and was lost among the last days of your life, when all that was left was to look back at days gone by, because to look forward meant to peek into the endlessness of days that were to be lived without you.

There is not a day that goes by that you are not mentioned here. The kids hold memories of you so near and dear to their hearts, striving to cherish each one by playing it much as a beloved recording of some dear song. If they shed tears it is not done in my presence, so acutely aware are they of my own sadness that they would never add to the pain. But they miss you so, Dad. Pictures of you crop up as bookmarks, or lining shelves in their closets, or in drawers. It startles me, at times, encountering your smiling face, raising a glass of cheer. You are so alive, so real ... And yet, you are no more.

I hope you have found peace and healing, Dad. We miss you.

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