Flat affect

I'm mired in some sort of annoying grieving phase over the untimely passing of my father, Jujj Sr. The days immediately following such a profound event don't offer much opportunity for reflection, as one is overwhelmed with decisionmaking, ceremonial activities, and the attention of relatives. Then you go back to work, but you're really busy there too because you're catching up, and everyone would like to have a few words with you besides. Nay, it takes some time for things to start to approach "normal" again, and that's when it really sinks in that yes -- it's normal -- but different.

I catch myself making mental notes along the lines of, "I should remember to tell dad about that." I had to remove dad from the list I had for Christmas ideas. That one hurt -- more so than trying to decide what to do with the birthday card I had bought for him a few days prior. It seems unreal that I can't just pick up the telephone and call him up. Actually, my sister stumbled into that strange predicament barely an hour after dad's death, when she was calling to get word to dad's colleagues. The place where he used to work still has an extended outgoing voice message in dad's voice at dad's old extension, and that's the connection my sister got that morning.

The merely "annoying" grief arises when I do fun stuff that gets retroactively draped in melancholia. Last night my wife and I went to see the Wallace & Gromit feature film. I thought it was marvelous but at the same time I was thinking "Dad would really go for this film," and so it was a little sad too. Will the intensity of these moods slacken with time? Sure, but I suspect what will help more than time will be all those happenings and circumstances that dad could do without. Like snow. How that man despised Wisconsin winters! When I see the first flake, I will smile that dad needn't concern himself again with coats, shovels, sleet and slush.

I have a theory about an intangible that drags some people down as the decades wear on, and it's related to the concept of "normal, but different." When our lives change for the better, it usually happens so gradually that we don't take notice of it, or we discount the significance because we expected it. Negative developments on the other hand often seem sudden and capricious, and are recalled from memory more readily because of that. So if you're not careful while looking back through a prism of forty, fifty, or sixty years, you can trick yourself into thinking that the best of times were all way far in the past, and everything since has been a series of stairsteps down. Plan on living long? Best to remember that "normal, but different" doesn't always have to be a negative, and that building the positives in your life may lack drama but is essential nonetheless.

I intend to live out the senior years that my father was denied. My great-to-the-sixth grandaddy lived to be ninety-nine without aid of great wealth or medicine. Surely in this century that's not an unreasonable target to shoot for? That so much of what I now know will change or disappear, I will take in stride. I shall watch the stars slide past one another with my own eyes. And through it all I will remember.