500 Days Ago I was sitting in the front row of the G.L. Johnson Chapel at People’s Church trying to avert my gaze from the black piano wood box to the left of me.
I felt my entire body slump into oblivion as I walked down that aisle and saw his face above the casket. How could someone’s entire life and existence be shoehorned into a 6×2 rectangle?
He was always so morbid, always talked about being buried in a pine box. I hated when he talked about death but it probably prepared me for the inevitable. I wish it wasn’t so soon.
We had so much more to talk about.
It’s the part I’ll never get over. I lost my best friend, the person I talked to 10 times a day about the stupidest shit, everything from memes to headlines to news stories to family drama.
This was all brought front and center tonight as I opened up mail. I was honored to receive a printout of my dad’s eulogy speech from our fine senator. I blacked out during its delivery so it’s nice that I have a hard copy.
Reading this, I remember those stories in my head. I hear my dad’s voice telling them. I think that’s the part I’ll never get over. If I think of his voice, it gives me chills. It always carried such weight, power. And I guess it’s still hard to comprehend that it’ll be relegated to memory.
I’m at a stage now where I only have happy memories. They’re painful in the sense that they’re memories, that they’re a stake hammered into the ground of the past, that I feel like I’m standing from a distance and can see them but they’re finite points in the passage of time.
I think – I hope my dad would be proud of me now. I think there are some decisions I’ve made that he probably wouldn’t have initially agreed with, but would’ve understood upon explanation. There’s a certain stubbornness and definitiveness I clearly inherited for him. We both arrive at conclusions and execute them quietly, and the chips fall where they may.
I can’t visit his place of rest. I pass the freeway exit every time leaving Fresno and I keep going. I don’t think he’d want me to be there, because I don’t think he necessarily felt that all that there was of him is there. It’s in his brothers and sisters, my mom, his mom, the extended family, the good things he did and tried to do.
Half of me will always be my dad, and it’s not something to live up to – it’s who I am, for better or for worse. For the rest of my life the best I can do is to steer that wheel towards the better. I think that’s all he ever wanted.
