This is the next post after the eulogy for my father. Time is right for it. Two years and more have passed and a lot happened, including the good things, and then the stage was set for this next post. A few days ago I went to the library to take out a few audiobooks (books recorded on CD). I picked a few, but my library card had expired and I needed a new card. Bringing up the records, I noticed that the last time I used the library was on the eve of my father's death, and the last two audiobooks I returned, were the first two I was looking to take out. That's a weird coincidence if there ever was one. It occurred to me just how profoundly the death of my father had affected me. I stopped listening to recorded books, something I been doing my whole life, and I didn't even notice it. I wasn't particularly devastated by my father's death - I didn't tear my hair or go catatonic or stopped functioning. Never took a day off from work. I was paying to bury my father, my father passed after a long, long illness that never relented, much as I hoped for a remission, and instead of stabilization or even recovery and regeneration, tissue turned cancerous. And yet, when he passed, his death was sudden. When the final crisis hit, at one point it really hit me, the full realization that my father is dying. There was a desperate entry in my journal. Just one. I will always remember where I was - driving along an industrial stretch of the road, post apocalyptic and romantic in its desolateness, and I was sitting in traffic, going to the bank to put some money in my mother's bank account, when it hit me. Then I was back to the usual, and my father passed a few days later.
Life went on. Money was not an issue right away, financial hardship came a bit later, and it wasn't fatal, nor it sank me. It wasn't as bad looking back at it, as it seemed back them. The household in paradise where my father passed away, the tropical blue skies, the white marble and white carpeting, the white silk curtains on the window and the lush greenery outside, that household imploded in a modern day version of the American Gothic and a touch of the House of Usher, but everyone escaped, though deeply scarred. Blinded and bed-ridden, my father was the anchor, but his passing had nothing to do with what happened afterwards. Nothing terrible, the left Florida and resettled elsewhere. leaving the Paradise Years behind.
My life went on as well. I figured a way out of the financial crisis and emerged debt free having buried my father. The year my father passed turned out to be a terrible one for me personally. Work-wise I was no longer on my way up, but on my way out, maybe a few years too early, but otherwise I did okay. Relationship with my g/f grew stronger. After my father's passing I started doing things on my Bucket List, including the New Year's Walk, but more on that later. In the end, that weekend when I drove out to the library to get some audiobooks, was the last and final thing in the process of things going back to the way they used to.
