It still amazes me sometimes that my dad is no longer with us. Just the other day, my mom and I discovered two old letters, one from the 1950s and one from the 1960s, that my grandmother received from some cousins in Poland, and we sighed wistfully at how my dad would have been able to translate them for us (or at least B.S. his way through it) and tell us a bit more about that branch of the family. Today would have been my dad’s 79th birthday.
We had a complicated relationship, and that has made dealing with his loss infinitely more difficult.
But I did love him, and I learned so many things from him, and I do miss him.
Happy birthday, Dad.
Some days I do not miss my mother at all (as in ‘I am not at all sad that she is not here today’), which makes for hard days, I find. “Oh the guilt”, etc. The complicated people in our lives remain every bit as complicated after they are gone, I think. Lessons learned the hard way.
This confirms a thought I have that my sisters and I will find my mother’s death very hard when it happens. She is horrible to us now but there is no chance of redemption once she is gone.