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.