365 days. All I can think about is my father's death. He died just more than a year ago. And what a year it has been. I'm not missing him any more than I normally do nor I am I feeling overly sentimental. But something has been quite wrong. I've felt tightly wound, desperately running away from an overall feeling of....'yuck.' A feeling so odd, so foreign and disturbing I type and delete the words I long to use to describe it. All I can say is yuck. Discomfort. Death is yucky. It's final. It's disturbing. My father appeared uncomfortable during his last days. His body labored. It was horrible to witness. That's where my mind keeps leading me...
A year ago, after my Dad passed away, I was able to grieve and miss him and smile for him and cry for him. I wrote a eulogy that poured from my heart to the paper. I shared my love, my funny and my memories of my father with the wonderful, generous and loving friends and family that came to his funeral. I was in a spiritual place that kept me calm, grateful and present. This allowed me a quiet, cleansing, authentic grieving period. I felt the loss deeply, it sluiced through me and I felt closer to my dad during those first months after his death than I had previously during his illness when he was alive. I felt as if I could feel him with me, see him clearly smiling and laughing and driving me crazy with his obnoxious antics. I breathed him in.
365 days later. I have grown distant from authenticity, from presence, from calm. I lost my balance. My life rolled out of control collecting stress after stress. My husband's business had set backs, which caused our family some setbacks. My mother moved in with us and not long after her move in, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. My zen like spirituality wasn't strong enough to hold up to the new shit storm brewing around me. As I wrote this post, a few edits from publishing it, I stumbled upon this quote:
