I'm Okay...

For you, Dad.

........................................................

Look for me right when the lights go down
My own little natural high
I should be floating on top of the world
But I just keep wondering why

I feel more alone in this wonderful crowd
And I ever do on my own
I know that this is a place I belong
But I'd rather be coming back home

Oooh, I want you to know I'm okay
I just need to know that you're waiting
you're waiting
for me

Someone keeps saying I could be a star
Never quite sure what that means
Sounds like there's something I'm missing right now
I'm not who they think I could be

All that I'm missing is you my love
Come find me whenever you can
I'll be the one looking up at the sun
with a picture of you in my hand

Oooh, I want you to know I'm okay
I just need to know that you're waiting
you're waiting
for me

Oooh, I want you to know I'm okay
I just need to know that you're waiting
you're waiting
for me, oohho

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nzcUg7qjVM

Found...

Thanks to old friends, some more photos of you.

I miss you every day. I'm trying to work through the pain of losing you. Some days are easier than others, some days I can't breathe. I keep getting hung up on the regret that I let you die alone. I should have been there.

Wild Scotland, Ashes and Dreams.

You're changing for me, Dad. I was reading back and realized that you're evolving. Your passed-on self is reality now and your living self is the past. Sometimes I feel as if I dreamt the living you. I'm hanging around the day you died. I can relive it anytime I want. It's my truth.
I spread some of your ashes, only the second time I've done it. This time I had the guts to touch them... well, I had no choice, really. The wind was whipping around me and I was on the  cliffs near an ocean in the wildest lands I've ever walked. It was near the 5000 year old ruins of Skara Brae. I had to move fast, so many people around. I unceremoniously/ceremoniously reached into the bag and palmed a handful of you, and faster than I could exhale...poof. You went.
You asked that they be spread in places I felt were beautiful. This time, your ashes covered me. My lips, my jacket, and my hair were coated in snowflakes of you. I looked into the grey sky and hoped you'd be happy there in such a wild place. Now that I look back on it, that place was so much of you. Wild, untamed, beautiful, mysterious and sacred.

My view and the sky where I set some of your ashes free.

The boat was in my dreams last night. Such a strange, confusing and painful dream. The boat was missing, lost, taken... and I was searching for it. I felt like failure. When I woke I was in a panic. I nearly ran downstairs to call Rocko. I'm so sorry this is going to so much crap, Dad. It isn't supposed to be like this! As I lay there I heard my own voice in my head talking you. I told you "I can't do this Dad, I need help. Please help me."
I slept again, and this time the dream was my mother and I searching for the boat. A call from behind me, my mom, she says she's found it. When I reach her she's looking up and smiling, saying "there she is!" I look up and the boat is resting, nested, 1/3 inside and on top of the roof of a house. I call out to the boat: "Hello old lady! There you are! How did you get up there huh?" and I am relieved and happy to see her. I see she's slightly damaged on her hull and the bare spines are showing but I know this can be fixed. Never mind how she got up there, I'm just glad she's safe. The boat is you, Dad. I think in ways she's your living self.

"Find Your Boat"

Cancer was the only storm the clouds didn't warn us about.....




Getting ready to move, I was sorting your things today. So many folders of papers with notes, appointments, invoices, pencil-written contracts on cigarette packs. I found a letter, folded in four, and the words "my sarah" double underlined. It was one of my letters mixed in with your morphine slips and unfilled prescriptions...and I just know you intended me to find it. It was the last letter I'd written you, the one where I told you about my depression; the end of my relationship with Julie, falling out of love, and how lost I was. You'd written notes within the lines, in response to mine. I nearly crumbled when I read your reply to my admittance that I'd fallen out of love with Julie: "You got guts, girl."
And then, at the end, in bold letters you told me "find your boat."

Find my boat, Dad. I hear you. Find what sustains me. Find peace that exists without anyone else. Find happiness and worth in my own creation. Find a home. Create my destiny and take pride in what I know is mine, is right, has meaning.

Thank you, Dad. Those 3 words may actually keep me alive, relentless in a storm. Never, ever give up on a dream. Thank you.


(But, god, oh god, how I do miss you still. I haven't stopped falling 'up'.)

Strange...

I don't actually know why I'm writing... I feel the need to talk to you. I want you to know how hard I'm trying to make it in the world, knowing you've gone on to another place. I feel you around me. It's getting easier to accept that you're gone, now, the days don't feel so raw anymore. I can look at your urn and I just feel familiar, I've developed a familiarity with your 'passed on' self. I guess that's it... when you died you became a stranger, this new form I'd never known you to have. You'd always been a constant in my life, to call on, to talk to, to know I could ask for help if I needed it, and, even run to.
You're still a constant, constant like the stars, constant like the moon. Even in daylight you're there above me, watching over me, and I know if I look up I can see your face. The world still turns beneath you and I am in it. I'm missing your voice right now, Dad. I need to see if I can find that DVD of you. I think I could be ready to hear you and see you again. I'm ready for that layer of pain. I love you my Daddy.

Been a while...

It's been time for this, Dad. I keep thinking I want to write but then I just talk to you out loud when I'm secure that I'm alone and nobody but you will hear me. And I say what I need to, so I don't write. But I want to. I want to record these things. I just read something in an older post that I would have forgotten... so it's resurrecting the desire to write.
It's happening all over again, Dad. I'm reliving it. Someone I love is losing someone they love to the same god damned evil that stole you from me and it makes me sick. It's such a bitter, hated thing. Cancer. Fuck Cancer.
Even the word sounds like an illness, as if saying it out loud will give it the power to latch on to our healthy, happy, sacred parts and seep them of their vitality until all that's left is a shell of what was. People call it "the C word". I call it Cancer. Name thy enemy! I'll walk around and say it all day. It can't have me. I refuse to sit and cower, afraid.
I'm thinking about the day the nurse called. It hit me again tonight (before I even read the post), the man's voice telling me "Leo has passed away."
As if to say "What we expected has happened, the inevitable has arrived, welcome to your destination..the local time has stopped and we appreciate you flying 'your life's changed completely' airlines." There's no humour in that. Some morbidity, maybe.
The fact is, nothing I can do will ever bring you back. It's entirely hopeless. I imagined meeting you in some kind of afterlife, talking about the coma before you died. I'd want to know if you'd already left by then... some cultures believe that to be the case. I'd like to think so. You made the choice to step out of that shell and get into the soft, shimmering mid-way point between life and afterlife...like a really good rest stop on a long easy highway. I remember the big trees. You used to stop us by those trees and I'd hug my arms around them, only reaching a 10th of the circumference. I like to imagine you leaving that shell and floating, easy, light, washed over with relief, laughing out loud as you turn to wisps. I need to imagine that, Dad, I need to know that Cancer didn't follow you through the back door.
I love you so.