I wasn’t able to blog yesterday. A large part of this was due to, ironically, blogging; I was buried at the office working on installing a different blogging platform for the company’s Web site. That said, there was another reason.
It was my Dad’s birthday.
One of the elements factoring into this getting older thing is how even as you look at a calendar with sadness noting how today’s date marks an anniversary one would just as soon forget, the year invokes a confession of reality. You wouldn’t want to see certain loved ones at the age they’d now be. It’s painfully better to remember them at their best, thinking of them this way and, for those situations where faith lives on both sides of the love, believing we will again see them as they were.
But you still miss them.
Dear God, how you miss them.
My heart is with you Jerry.
One of the things I do on my Mom’s birthday every year, is make her a cake with birthday candles and have my own little party for her. I buy or make her a card and write her a long letter. The I take it outside and light it on fire and imagine the smoke being the carrier of my words to her, as incense does prayer in many religions and cultures. It helps me a lot to really celebrate her life instead of grieve it. I was so stuck in my grief for years. I now act as if she were still here and she just lives a long way away. I cherish the nights that I dream and she is in the dreams, because that’s when she can still visit me. It feels like it anyway.
I miss her and my Dad so much.
We never get over it do we?
Through it, to a degree. Over it? No.
In his younger days my Dad enjoyed hunting. Sometimes at night when the sky is clear and Orion the Hunter is in the sky, I go outside and talk to the constellation like it’s my Dad. They are neighbors in the heavens, after all.
I look forward to joining them someday.