A New Kind of Father's Day

My father, Eugene Strait and myself, with young Greg Strait.  This picture is probably from 1982 or 1983.

I see the many things that people endure, and I know that it is a small thing in comparison.  People lose many, and it is always hard.

Nevertheless.

This was my first Father's Day without him here on this plane of existence. I knew it wasn't going to be easy.  I didn't know it would be as hard as it was.  

I miss him terribly.  Both he and my mother.  

The fact that he was 91, in slowly diminishing health, does not mitigate how much I miss him.  How much I wish he was here and strong again.  Aging may be natural.  It may be the way of things.  But it also sucks.

Disregarding beliefs about the afterlife, for right here, it hard to accept the fact that I will never see them again.  Sometimes, when I sleep and dream, I think that they are not gone.  But then I wake and have to accept it all over again.

Many of you have suffered losses, as great or greater than this.  It hurts, I know.  It may never stop hurting.  But we find ways to endure, and to remember.  We find ways to carry on, while carrying the shining light of those who have gone but have meant so much to us.

My father was a great man.  A man of many substantial achievements.  But nothing was as great as his kindness, nothing as significant as his politeness and basic human decency, nothing as important as the way he loved and cared for us.

Will next Father's Day be easier?

Maybe.

But I'm not even sure that I want it to be.  Pain and grief are a part of living, a part of coping, a part of remembering.  And this is part of his legacy in me - to empathize, to feel, to care.

Thank you, Dad.  I love you always.