Sighs and Goodbyes

I wonder how everything can feel so normal so soon after losing my Dad. Not that I expect the world to take notice of his passing, or that I expect to feel sad all the time, because I know that would be abnormal. Dad was such a pragmatic man. He wouldn’t have wanted us to make a fuss of things or sit around feeling sad because he was gone. He didn’t spend much time looking back, really.  And I tend to be a lot like him. I don’t remember a lot about the past and rarely dwell on it. Instead I have these flashback memories, snippets of something that happened, little fleeting memories that come out of nowhere and just make me cry for what used to be for a little while.
I remember him in the hospital after his leg was amputated, he woke up in excruciating pain, tears rolling down his face. I have never seen someone in such agonizing pain. And I remember him racing past me in his wheelchair, grinning while he showed me how fast he could go, outside the hospital after we had been to visit Mom. The two memories are probably five years or more apart and have nothing to do with each other, but suddenly they were there in my head, like two pages in a book.  It’s almost like having a dream, where the mind replays all the things it has seen and heard and thought during the day, only they are not in any real order, just flashing through as the mind reboots. Is my mind doing some sort of catalog function of my memories of Dad, putting them in order somehow? I didn’t tell it to…

Yesterday a client sent me a card saying they had donated in dad’s memory to the Arbor Day Foundation and 25 trees were going to be planted in his memory.  What a sweet and lasting tribute to my country boy dad. And yet reading his name on the card made the tears come in a flood.  Grief is so strange. Here one minute and gone the next, just waiting until you are feeling peaceful and happy so it can sneak up on you and knock you down again.  But eventually it fades and life moves forward as it should.