When I was growing up, I never imagined a world without Daddy in it. He was always there, a quiet-spoken man of steel. One who said what he thought, whether anyone else agreed with him or not. But, even then, only if someone asked him what he thought.
A lot of people under-estimated him on the intellectual front because he wasn't an obvious intellectual. I doubt if he ever knew he was.
But he was.
I don't remember many conversations that didn't make me think about something other than as I would have before.
It’s been almost a year now, and part of me still doesn’t believe what happened in that hospital room in Memphis was real. I helped pick out the coffin and the grave stone, as well as help make the decision to turn off life support.
As I told Mama when she was faced with the possibility of having to cut off life support, “You’ll know what to do when it’s right. It’ll be the easiest thing and the hardest thing you’ve ever done. All at once. Easy, because you know it’s right, but hard because it’s the last thing in the world that you want to do.”
I know it all happened: I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.
And yet I don’t believe, on some level, that it did.
Grief is a strange animal: it shifts and twists and takes on forms you would not recognize until it bites you on the nose. It creeps up in the night while you’re sleeping and makes you sit straight up in bed. It waits around the corner where an old car that pulls into a parking lot makes you think of him.
“He would love this”, I think to myself.
And then I remember that he’s not here anymore.
I remember everything, but I still don’t believe any of it.
Such is the nature of mourning and grief.
I know what happened, and in time belief will follow.
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