just to start - today was 1/11, and when i got into the car this morning the mileage was 111,111. ahem.

today i was thinking of my dad a lot...not sure why. sometimes the thought just seems to raise its head up out of the blue. i don't even know exactly what to write about this feeling, when i think of him sometimes... i've really been trying since he died to hold onto the last few months of his life and how that felt... when he was trying to show me he cared and was actually aware of mistakes he'd made... and we were trying as hard as we could to just move forward from that point. i keep trying to keep that feeling, but it's hard. i struggle to replace everything i ever felt toward him, and from him before, with that. it's almost like trying to block out a 20x24 print with a polaroid picture (forgive the work analogy)...then saying, "ok, now ONLY look at the polaroid!!" too much of the edges show thru, and i find myself focusing on all that instead.

but then i think of what that must have been like the last few days of his life, and i feel like i'm harping. i think of what he must have gone thru lying there alone, going in and out of lucid thought. when he told me he'd let me down, and he kissed my hand, and tears rolled down his cheeks.......what he must have been thinking and feeling up to that point... and how hard it must have been for him to finally realize that, and to actually say it outloud... and then to die alone, with no one there to hold his hand or comfort him... i think of that, and then wonder what right i have to still feel slighted by this man.

isn't that what i wanted? isn't that what i told myself and anyone else within earshot?...that he was going to be sorry one day when he realized what a blablabla he was and no one was around to deny it? that's exactly what happened. so shouldn't i feel justified?

i don't.

maybe i should, but i don't.

and maybe it's because...i never wanted to feel justified...maybe i just wanted to be proven wrong. maybe i just wanted him to love me. and maybe i feel slighted because he finally realized everything i'd wanted him to realize the day before he fucking died, leaving no time to enlarge the goddamn polaroid?

and maybe i usually try to avoid thinking of this stuff because i get all tangled up.

but i really have to keep trying to focus on the last few months. i have to be thankful for the time that we did have, because we almost didn't get it... if he'd been ANYWHERE else on the planet when it happened, he would have just died and we never would have had the time that we did. the things he said in the hospital, the phone calls, the grocery arguments, the hospital again. none of it would have happened. i'd have just spent the rest of my life hating him for being such a cruddy blablablablabla and etc etc etc. but instead, we got to try. and we did. and HE did.

and i have to remember that.

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your father's dead, he passed in his sleep
and i woke to the sounds of her crying

11:40 p.m. - 2012-01-11