My father died a week ago today.
It’s hard to write those words. It’s hard to write anything right now.
Without one of the two people who created me alive any longer, I feel like a deep balance within me is lost.
He lived 94 wonderful years with three really awful weeks at the end. I go back over and over it to see if I could have made things different, but at each juncture, I don’t see how I could have chosen differently while he was unable to chose for himself any longer.
He was a famous environmentalist and artist and there were hundred of people at his Celebration of Life Ceremony yesterday and they all hugged me and I tried to speak and I cried and a member of the Navy gave me a flag and I don’t know how I can go back to school tomorrow as though nothing happened.
I am an only child and my mother is still living, but lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s and almost beyond reach.
As I sprinkled his ashes, the water turned to gray smoke and flowed away.
I’m not sure where I am flowing from here.
