525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year?

Yes, measure in love, as the lyrics from "Rent" tell us. But to understand that almost a year, 525,600 minutes, has gone by since my father died is impossible. To be sure the year has been filled with love, but with less love than there would otherwise have been. The questions that remain I dare not ask. The answers I dare not hear.

I was going to send flowers to my Mom for the day, and then I thought not, as if flowers could fill the emptiness. Then I thought I should. As if not sending them would make her forget.

My mother is slowly dispersing my father's clothes, suits, ties, his tuxedo that he was so proud to buy and wore only once on my wedding day. She's asked my permissiong to be sure, but I can't help that I'll go home and he'll be gone, no trace of him anywhere. Ha. As if he's not gone already.

One of my dearest friends asked me two weeks after he died, "What do you want for Christmas?" I wanted to slap her. What did she think I wanted?! She wouldn't stop asking. I never gave her an answer.

Sigh. And here I thought a year would never pass, we would never reach that day again, and yet it approaches, relentlesly. Heeding neither grief nor joy, time marches on, right over the top of my father's grave.

The Joys That Sting
by C.S. Lewis

To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
To order one pint where I ordered two,
To think of, and then not to make, the small
Time­honoured joke (senseless all but to you).

To laugh (oh, one'll laugh), to talk upon
Themes that we talked upon when you were there,
To make some poor pretence of going on,
Be kind to one's old friends, and seem to care,
While no one (O God) through the years will say
The simplest, common word in just your way.

This is, I think, my favorite photo of my father, taken about two years ago...



I didn't know it existed. My husband and I were sorting through old photos and there he was, just sitting on the couch, watching my friends and I chatting in the living room.

The night before I left for college I couldn't sleep and I got up and he was sitting there on that couch watching some old western on tv. He couldn't sleep either.