So Sad

I'm sad tonight for no reason I can isolate. Not upset or angry or even jaded. Just sad.

Maybe it's the impending trip to Tennessee, where my mother and I will spend too much time talking about Daddy. We always seem to end up there. She will tell me again how he's the only man she ever really dated, and I will tell her that he was the only daddy I ever had. It's become a ritual that helps us put him into a cubbyhole somewhere that we can deal with more easily.

And it's not that I mind talking. It's good for the soul. It's the primary way, after all, that we work through our grief. If we choose to confront it head-on, that is.

Some don't. They either deny it and won't talk or try to use it as a manipulative tool to further their own agendas. And we have some of all that going on in our family.

I think I'm sad mainly because I miss Daddy. But I'm also sad about the ways that others have responded to his death. Almost two years after the fact, some are in denial and others are using it as a crutch to prop up what boils down to a simple lack of will to move beyond it.

I've told many people that I will never get over Daddy's death any more than I will get over the death of others that I loved who died before him.

We do not get over death; we only move beyond.

My first partner died almost a decade and a half ago and, although I have been with Shannon for 9 years and love him dearly, the void that his untimely departure created remains as real as it ever was.

When I go home, the house will feel empty without Daddy. It did the night we came home from the hospital and he came back in a hearse, and it has ever since. Something always seems to be missing.

When I'm there, I'll still expect him to come in the back door and sit down at the kitchen table or in his favorite chair in the living room. But he won't. And when he doesn't, I'll feel his absence all the more acutely.

Maybe that's why I'm sad, or maybe it's something else. All I know is that I feel sad.

So sad.