angela_n_hunt | Grief Decade (Reply)

Today, my father has been dead for ten years.

This picture was taken during one Christmas Day back in the late 80s/early 90s. I don’t know which, as I don’t have a date written on the back, more’s the pity. Dig those giant glasses.

This year is a bad one. Some years are. I miss him with an ache that is not a pain that is easily described. Part void, part ball made of knives, part abyss.

I want him back. I want the early irritating mornings of him waking me too early because he has to have his eggs and his paper and his coffee. I want the sound of his voice. I want his laugh. I want his big toothy grin. I want the way his arms felt around my shoulders when he would hug me, like I was being enfolded by a giant friendly bear, not a man.

I always felt safe when he hugged me. Even as an adult.

But more than any of that?

I want to see him with my girls. I want to see Mouse mouthing off at him, insisting that she is smarter than him, and making him laugh. I want to see Bean running at him, screaming her head off, her mouth wide and smiling. I want to see him sitting with Mouse, drawing equations on napkins, explaining how math is the language of the Universe. I want to see him draw his Acme silly joke drawings for the Bean and explain that Wile E. Coyote is not a super genius to emulate.

I want.

I want this more than I can express.

And I am never going to get it.

Somehow, I will have to be these things. Somehow I will have to find a way to pass those things on, but at nowhere near the same fidelity, because I will only ever be a copy of his way of doing it, and I will only ever be at the mercy of the frailty of memory, no matter how dedicated or committed I may be to writing down every single last thing I can.

Somehow, I will have to set myself on fire, so that his memory doesn’t get lost here in the shadow he still casts. Somehow, I must be like a movie projector, throw light through the lens, and in imperfect moving pictures, pass on what he taught me, even if it will never never NEVER be the same.

And somehow I have to make peace with that.

But not today.

*screams at Bitch Entropy*

Originally published at ANGELA N. HUNT. You can comment here or there.