Another swirl of mourning
by Jack GrantEven though I told him often when he was alive and I know he knew it very well, I feel a need to call my Dad up and tell him I love him.
My next to last words to him were, “I love you, Dad.”
His reply, “I know.”
My last words to him, “I’ll take care of things, don’t worry.”
His response, a nod.
That was his way, the way of his generation, not touchy-feely at all, but acknowledging feelings the best they could.
Yet, I feel I need to tell him again I love him, even though I directed him to posts here where I wrote about my feelings towards him, and after his death found the papers on his desk where he had printed them out, even though I said it out loud to him in no uncertain terms.
A good friend told me that the so-called “stages of grief” were a too orderly way of describing an event in our lives that is more like a storm, a tempest that swirls around us and through us with the different feelings. We try to impose the logic of sequence upon them when they are really are random waves of emotion.
Hence my irrational need to say to the dead what I know I told him when he was alive.
Yes, I should be happy that I know he understood fully how I felt when he was still here for me to tell him.
But that is logic, what the mind says, it is not what my heart weeps.
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