My Dad

I was lying in bed last night thinking about this blog that I have undertaken, feeling quite excited, musing about what sort of things I would write about, frankly, wondering if I would have enough to write about!  That made me think about the sort of things I would like my children to know about me, my life with them and my life before them...and that made me think about my dad.  Pretty soon there were tears trickling down my face and not long after that I was in full blown sobbing.  I just cannot get past the fact that I never got to see my dad before he died, and he never saw me.  As I write my eyes fill.  It was so unexpected. I talked to him on Christmas Day and berated him for not going to the doctor like my mom had told him to.  I talked to him on the 4th of January, his birthday, and Sam sang happy birthday to him.  He couldn't talk very well because of having tubes down his throat after his surgery.  He still sounded like my dad though and he made me laugh.  He made a cryptic comment about the gifts that my boys had given him for Christmas which I didn't really understand.  It was only after he died and I was back in South Africa helping my mom go through his things that I found some Christmas present tags that he had written for himself, from the kids.  He had bought himself some things he wanted and written funny little messages explaining them.  I also found cards that he had written for my mom, but not from him, they were from the birds and the cat!  I laughed, and I also sobbed.


You hear lots of stories about the tragedy and grief when parents lose their children, but you don't hear about the raw pain of losing a parent, when you are an adult.  Maybe it's because it is the cycle of life, it is expected that children should outlive their parents.  But man oh man does it hurt. Two and a half years later and I still struggle, on a nearly daily basis, with the fact that I won't see my dad again.  Or be able to tell him how much I love him.  How grateful I am for all the thing he did for me, all the sacrifices he made.  I guess the only salve is time, that as the years pass, the edges will be less ragged, will start to smooth over, like scar tissue. 


I hope.