dad’s house<\/a> this morning. Firefighters found him. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.<\/p>\nIt’s been an hour or two since I started this post. My sister made the ID. Then she called me after wards. She said the coroner was incredibly nice to her. I asked my sister to send me the photo of my dad’s arm and she did. I needed to see him. Get his death in my mind more concretely. I am so far away and my dad was mostly absent from my life even without all this geographical distance. Add onto that the suddenness of it his death and it was just getting to abstract. I don’t know if this is the right place to air these thoughts. But I think I just want to be witnessed. The experience of having him in my life was not known to many folks and I don’t want his passing to have the same kind of loneliness.<\/p>\n
When I was talking to my sister today she told me the sweetest story about my dad comforting her once as a kid when she was sad and angry with him. It was a little heartbreaking, the story she told me, but I was grateful for the tenderness of it.\u00a0 I think my sister and I both harbored secret fantasies that maybe one day we’d have some heartfelt conversation with our dad about his absence in our lives. It never happened; now, it never will. I was trying to think of my last conversation with my dad. I talked to him on the phone maybe twice a year and it was usually around the holidays. But this Christmas he was sick and we didn’t connect, so that means the last time I talked to him was before the holidays. I think that was when we were talking about this Byzantine church he goes to and I asked him if I could go with him the next time I came home. And he said, “I dunno.” And when I pressed him on it he said,”I gotta go.”<\/p>\n
I miss him. I always have.<\/p>\n
Thank you all for being my witness here. It means the world to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Or not. Unless we’re talking the wh0le shebang. As in life’s beginning and end. And that’s what we’re talking about. Right now as I’m typing I’m pretty sure my sister is talking with the Marion County Coroner who has emailed my sister a photo of my dad’s tattooed arm so that she can identify my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}