Sunday, June 21, 2009

Father's Day without Dad


I woke up this morning and didn't want to face the day. It is the First Father's Day since my Dad passed on and it makes me sad. All the good and happy memories come pouring into my head like a flood bursting through a dam. The not so happy memories, the bad, the ugly ones are trailing along below, lost in the undercurrent. This is on purpose, I choose to remember the good times. Vacations with lots of site seeing and laughter. Games of Checkers, Uno, and Monopoly. Singing and Traveling were the two loves of his life. They remain a part of me and who I am, but somewhere, below the surface, in the deep lies the bad and the ugly.

Depression is a selfish disease and so I push my own self away and think of my nieces, Terry's children, how they lost their Dad so young and how they must be feeling today on Fathers Day. All grown up now, as it has been 9 years and 7 months, since Terry died. But, I can not stay with them in my thoughts for I still cry for our loss. It is still too overwhelming for me to except completely, and I wonder why? Why is it that I cannot seem to except this one fact that my brother has died without tears and then the pushing back of tears, until the idea of it seem completely ludicrous?

Dad and Terry having died 9 years and 4 months apart, but are forever linked in my mind and heart. If truth be told, they are linked to me by mental disease. Dementia and Depression stretching around them and me like a great noose, choking the life from us. Of the three, I escaped into the river of life and find myself floating and being carried along that wild and raging river to a peaceful shallow stream, never delving beneath the surface, lest I be swallowed up by the dangerous aforementioned undercurrent, and so it here that I remain a shallow soul in shallow waters, until at last I am swept under and away to join them.

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