Here’s a picture of our last Monday business lunch together from June 2016. I didn’t know at the time it was the last one. Father’s Day is this Sunday and that reality has been lurking at the side of my mind all week. I’m not even that sentimental about Hallmark created events but it does cause me to pause to consider the impact of a father on a daughter’s life. Last year I bought my Dad three different Father’s Day cards because I kept misplacing my collection. I never delivered one to him in 2016. He didn’t seem to mind. When I told him what I done, he said, “Well, it looks like we are set for the next three years.” I’m glad I had the kind of Dad that I wanted to send a card to on Father’s Day. I never needed to send him a card for him to know that he mattered to me.
Now before I get too wrapped up in sentimental cheese cloth I must also say, my Dad was opinionated, bossy, quick tempered and could be quite impatient with me. Over the years of my youth my Dad and I had a hard time connecting to each other. I was the free-spirited daughter who read Langston Hughes poetry and copied the poems into my journals. I was a kid with Attention Deficit issues who could not for the life of me remember to hang up a wet towel, close a cupboard door, or do my math homework in any semblance of order. My Dad taught me how to number put my math homework on notebook paper in a way which my teacher could read.
I will not offer any moral lessons or try to draw a conclusion from today’s post. However, I will borrow this phrase from Richard Paul Evans; we all live with the assumption of a tomorrow. We assume life will go along the way we anticipate and plan.
“The assumption of time is one of humanity’s greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there’s always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.” (Alan Christoffersen’s Diary) The Walk
One of my resolutions following this almost year of grief is to no longer put off necessary conversations and relationships. It calls upon me to move beyond my fears and to ask the harder question, new accountability and more truth telling than I am comfortable with on a daily basis. I’ll be sending out a Father’s Day card to one of my favorite men in the world, my father-in-law. Don’t tell him though. He hates mushy stuff.
und and some kind of idea of what was not working on the car. He carried in his head a list of preferred mechanics and a general price list of the cost of repairs. I was always amazed at his ability to know that stuff. He also had a way of chatting with mechanics which usually resulted in additional information about repairs and avoiding unnecessary expenses. Dad was a whiz at this stuff.
r all the flowers have dried up from the funeral
ck and numbness is ebbing away and reality is coming back into focus. Honestly, I prefer the numbness to the prickling thoughts that stick in my head: what about Christmas, what about Monday lunches, what about all of Dad’s stuff, what about the questions I meant to ask him, what are we supposed to do now? The whats and whys and hows are part of the cycle in my thoughts. I wish my thoughts would slow down a bit and I could finish an activity. For now I will try to stay present in this moment of peace with my sweet Ginger dog on my lap, under my laptop, and a cool glass of water.
es on after the death of a loved one but I’m not ready for this new normal. Usually I call my Dad about car stuff. He was the kind of guy who “knew a guy” who could fix my cars. Or you could describe the symptoms of the problem and he could diagnose the solution with just a phone call. I remember well the time I called him about a problem with my minivan. I described the problem Dad diagnosed it as a malfunction in the starter and told me where to take, who to ask for and about how much it should cost.
into the house were surreal. Under a table by my Dad’s chair sat his SAS shoes which he wore almost every day. Those shoes were the tipping point for me in tears. The tears that had been saved up from the previous day were not to be denied today. There’s no handbook for this stuff. We just make it up as we go along. I left the shoes because I couldn’t bear to think of Dad not returning to those ugly, orthopedic shoes. Fast forward a couple of hours later and the second thing my mother does is move the shoes into the bedroom. She can’t stand to look at the shoes sitting in the living room and I can’t stand the idea that the owner of the shoes will not return.
I’m calling this new section of my blog, The Undiscovered Country for a couple of reasons. I like Star Trek. The last movie with the original cast was called 
Shelly Speaks Up 