It would seem that tomorrow (or rather today when most people will read this) is my least favorite day. I can find nothing good about the day this year. Some years this anniversary sneaks up on me, here before I know it gone before I feel it, leaving a bitter taste in it's wake. Other years the dread starts a few weeks out, the questions start to crop up, the doubt sneaks in, the sad middle right below the sarcastic exterior.
Tomorrow, the twenty-fourth, marks the 19th anniversary of my father's death. This year feels so particularly hard, I have spent the last few weeks inside my own head trying to figure out why but nothing seems reasonable to me. Nothing seems so big that 19 years later I would be so darn sad. I would have assumed I would be numb to it.
Ahhhh Grief, you are one sneaky mistress.
I recently became somewhat obsessed preoccupied with remembering the last time I saw my father. Or rather the last time we saw each other. I remember very vividly the last time I saw my father down to the room and everything and everyone in it. I remember the last fight we had, something stupid and pre-teenish on my part, exasperation on his end. I remember the last phone call. I remember the first phone call of the new forever. But no matter how hard I try I can't remember the last time we hugged.
Or laughed.
I often feel like a baby for still missing him as much as I do. I'm not sure where or when I decided that grief has a time limit. Dude. It totally doesn't. It is a major bummer to realize that there will be more moments for the rest of my life where I feel this intense...there really are no words to describe this particular blend of emotion.
Someone tried to compare the death of my father to the choice absence of theirs. It was not a choice for him to go (forty-eight is too young for anyone). I can't hire a detective to track him down or send him letters and hope for a response. Oh, how I wish he would have had the foresight to write each of us letters. Nothing long or dramatic but just something. Anything.
So *sigh* nineteen years, sometimes it feels like nineteen minutes and sometimes like nineteen lifetimes. So much has changed in the world and in my life but one thing remains, steadfast and clear, I love him just as much today as I did nineteen years ago.
*From the song Now and Then by Adkins, Adele Laurie Blue
