Thursday, October 15, 2009 

i discovered recently while reflecting during transit (as i am wont to do these days, whether walking or being whisked and jolted here and there via the tube) that somehow my grief, the quality of my missing papa has transitioned in the past year.

it is not so acute. after nearly five years (can that be?) it has become a slow burn. there is now a chunk of life lived without his presence, his influence. in some ways this hurts even harder. i'm losing the sound, the timbre of his 'hello' when he answered the phone, the memory of his shuffle when he walked out back to feed the goats and dogs and g-d-knows-what-else, emus i guess, more distant, even the first grief a grief of the past, those instances of remembering now something to be remembered, things mediated by the march of minutes as time presses ever forward, even as the past several months have been such a sound vacuum, this bubble of time somehow impervious to reality, or is it vice versa?

in many ways i am keeping my thoughts about the past year to myself as they take shape. i am in process.

not that i am suggesting there is a destination, some place where i may dust off my hands and declare the work finished, to have somehow come to understand what has taken place (that would be to ascribe it Meaning, i think)... but the analysis is too vulnerable, too young, perhaps too ugly...

as i live out the consequences of having checked out from the world for a while to *not die* and recover, the gravity of what has taken place sinks in, shaking me. everyone else already went through this, from the worried space of the proverbial (and actual) bedside.

i feel jarred, violently ripped from the life that i knew, battered about and left to recover. the hard work of regaining physical health has led me to sustainable habits. the people i love helped me with that. it is time to figure out what to do with these pieces, to fold this experience into my identity as i make a life again for myself.