In memento mori...

Today is the anniversary of my Dad's death. The last one, anyway, as there were others that came along the way where he lost different parts of himself. His energy, his bodily control, eventually his mind...and only finally his breath. At one point, he completely lost himself, but he came back and we had a little more time with him. It wasn't long enough, but it was something. For a long time I could only remember him as that husk that we spent the last week taking care of. There was the jaundice. There was the smell. There were the tremors. There...was NOT my Dad.

Then little bits started coming back. The way he would throw his head back and laugh when something really amused him, or the way he could tell a fantastic story and keep all of us rolling, or the way I used to sit on the bed when I was little while he played "Puff, the Magic Dragon." It wasn't even the easy one, with just chords. There was fingerpicking involved. Then I remembered the nights of stargazing- he always HAD to wear his flightsuit and jacket that I got him one year- ostensibly so that he would have enough pockets to hold things, but mostly because he was a huge nerd. We spent hours picking out nebulas, planets, star clusters...and, on nights when we couldn't seem to find anything else, the moon. Reassuring, nice big target. Hard to miss, even when we were stinking it up. There were poker games, late night conversations over tea, tooooooo many nights of him helping me with homework...and a lot of love.

There's not a way to get around it. His last few years really sucked. For him much more than for us, although it certainly wasn't a picnic on our end either. I've come to some hard conclusions about free will and death (which I will happily share, although it's rather a late night conversation). He's missing a lot of things. He's missing anniversaries with Mom and Sam's Kindergarten graduation. He missed our wedding. He's missing the arrival of two grandbabies here in a few months...they will undoubtedly be less geeky in his absence, although Kyle and I will attempt to serve as substitute geekiness nurturers. Mom says he's still watching, and sometimes I think that.

The thing that I, and a lot of other people, try to take from Dad is this: that even as he was dying, he still wanted to teach people about God. He was slowly being burned down to his most fundamental being, and what was left still believed in God. What was left still wanted to share that with other people. We should all be so focused.

So, today, have a cup of tea (Lipton most assuredly does NOT count), look at the stars, and remember a really, really funny guy who left us all too soon.