thread: 2006-12-12 : Status report
On 2006-12-12, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
My dad died on May 6, 1997, shortly before two in the afternoon, literally in my arms, with me on one side and my mom on the other. He'd been failing for a decade—he was born in 1914, for crying out loud—and had been increasingly weak and sick and miserable for a year. Moving back home for that year was one of the best things I've ever done, especially because in many ways, I got to "take a year" before he died instead of after.
It's been nine years now, and I'm married to a woman he never met, and we have a daughter he never met, and in the last few months, for the first time, I'm starting to have dreams about seeing him again. In most of them, my dream-self knows he's dead. In most of them, for what it's worth, he's happy.
It takes a year, and ten years, and the rest of your life, in different ways and at different levels of intensity. And it should take that long, because this is our fathers we're talking about (our mothers soon enough), and they are the source of us, and part of us, always.
