I've been thinking about my dad a lot lately. Thinking about him has generally tapered off a bit in the last six months or so, but for some reason, the last couple of weeks have been particularly saturated. I both love and hate to look at pictures of him. I'm not sure what to think anymore when I see his face. Part of him has become so fictional--as if he never really existed but as a lovely figment of my imagination. Of course I know that's not true, but this is a battle raging between head and heart. The head knows the truth: he was around for 24 years (of my life), and now he's not. But the heart knows its own awkward reality: if he had been here, he should still be here. So I'm in a topsy-turvy whirlwind of this strange inability to understand...even though I do understand in most senses.

I'm very good at pushing things out of my mind when I need to. Like when something is too painful to think about, I think of something else. But that gift-curse is less forward than it used to be, and now I'm having a hard time blocking out the hard times. I miss my dad in so many ways different than before...different than two years ago. But in some ways still the same. The one that gets me most is the truth that this is permanent. Two years and almost five months later and he's still gone...and in another two years, and another ten, and twenty more after that, my dad will still be gone. Another one of those dualistic certainties - I know, but I don't know.

There's no real way to fix this, though I think that's for what I keep hoping. No amount of therapy or drugs will make me okay with my dad's never coming back. Maybe time will help me adjust, accept, move on, but nothing in the world will ever be able to take away the pain. I will always hurt for the loss of my dad, and I will never be the same person I was December 5th of 2007, the day before he left. Death does not work that way on your heart when it takes someone you love so deeply. It doesn't allow you to become whole again...to stop missing that person...to forget how different life is without him.

I don't mean to say I'll never be okay. I'll be okay, and to most degrees, I'm already okay. Really, what I need to find now is the courage to accept that the hole will always exist. The place where my dad used to reside in my heart will always be painful and tender. And that that's acceptable. Too, that if, for the rest of my life, I have these aches and doubts and moments of stand-still, I'm okay.