thread: 2006-12-12 : Status report
On 2006-12-12, Mo wrote:
My dad is still in my dreams, more than eight years after he died of lung cancer & metastasized brain tumors. In them I sometimes realize that he's dead, and sometimes I don't. In them, he never speaks. Instead he just moves with us as though he were with us, and although the people in my dreams don't talk to him, they treat him as if he were living.
His illness claimed him quickly. Almost four months to the day after he was diagnosed he died in front of my eyes. He was an exceedingly proud man who never admitted that he was dying. It's not that he fought it tooth and nail and didn't admit that he would lose the battle, it's that he never admitted that the cancer was going to end him, even as it did.
The first year was brutal. I remember it mostly as a fog, and I threw myself into my work to get beyond it. It's like magic, that year... all of a sudden one day the fog lifts and there's life again that's too much like it was before. There are still things that rock you to the roots after that year, and though the comer fewer and farer between they're no less shaking.
When I got married to Brand, who never had the privilege of knowing my dad, it shook me terribly. When I got promoted and sent abroad (the first time) to represent the very company he had worked for, I wondered if he would have been proud of me. Since my sister and her partner have adopted their little girl, I can't help but look at her and think about what he would have thought. And this year, the biggest challenge yet... when my mother started dating.
Whatever strength I gathered along the way in the last eight years. Can I lend it to you?
