Three Months

I know I said this blog was finished. I lied. It may never be finished. I don’t know or care whether anybody even reads it anymore.

Today it is three months since my dad died. Well, technically, he died three months ago yesterday, March 10th, but it was so close to midnight that it seems like it happened on March 11th. That’s when all the people came and his body was taken away.

The cards and letters did finally stop. Oh, one appears every week or so as word is still spreading, though pretty much everybody knows by now. Nature and Science each published obituaries, as have several other scientific publications. Friends still ask how I’m doing or how my mother is holding up.

My mother, sister and I share dull and chronic aches from deep wounds that will never completely heal. We still each cry from time to time; the intervals between are increasing. And we wonder if he was really real. My mom and I talked about it today as we walked together. It’s almost as if he never existed, that he was simply a character in a story we both know. Neither of us can explain why we feel this way. Perhaps we’re still isolating ourselves from the magnitude of our loss. After all, we’re used to his being gone months at a time—three months was typical. But he’s not coming home from this absence.

If he was indeed a fiction, at least he was in a hell of a hell of a good story.