Some Days

Some days are just too much, too much to handle when the grief gnaws at you and pulls at you and multiplies the problems, the needs, the pressures. Some days the energy, my energy, is depleted, depleted by the hurdles I must jump, the responsibilities I must carry and the seemingly unending line of people I must please or support or satisfy.

Some days are just too much and it is days like this that make me question everything.

Hopefully tomorrow won't be a 'some day'.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

My father would have turned 85 today. I have trouble picturing him at that age (perhaps that could be the only benefit to an early death!). This Birthday is different, though, different for me anyway. Different because on this day my mother is with him. As ridiculous as it sounds, and I do mean ridiculous, I take great comfort in the thought that they will celebrate his birthday together. Together in heaven.

Those are the kind of thoughts I have now, now that my grief is softer....not gone, just bearable. I think intently on what it is like for them, really like to be in heaven, free from the confines of the universal qualities that shape our lives, the laws of the physical world. I picture them as the qualities of who they were as people, their kindness, their humor, their faith and draw comfort.

So on this day, my father's 85th Birthday, I celebrate. I celebrate the man who was my father, the love he had for me, for my sister and for our mother. The way he lived his life and the legacy of the family he left behind. I miss him, sometimes even more now than in those painfully intense weeks and months in 1983 when he died. But on this day, on his day, I remember all that was so good about him and am thankful that we had him at all.

Happy Birthday, Dad.