It's been a year......

In 31 days it will be a year since he's gone, my father.  It makes me shake my head to clear it when I realize that.  How could that many days have come and gone?  And so much life has already been accounted for that he's "missed".  Weddings and grandkids setting off on their own adventures. things he'd have thoroughly reveled in, had he been here.  My father knew how to live life by the barrelful.

This is who he was; He liked mourning doves and black coffee.  He took walks for miles and spoke to every. single. person. he encountered.  He laughed easily and cried easier.  His heart was tender to anyone down on his luck.  He once loaned his car to a man he'd befriended just out of prison so he could drive and see a friend.  He was a giver.  He loved music and golfing and never failed to find a four leaf clover in the yard. He loved taking pictures and graduated proudly from his polaroid to his digital camera over the years.  He learned to play the trombone in high school and could play it almost until the "end."  I can remember hearing "Stand Up for Jesus" echoing out of his room when I came to visit him at the facility where he was being cared for.

 My favorite memory, the one that says "this is my dad"....I was asleep on a Saturday morning and woke up to the sound of a radio playing just outside my door.  I got up and peered out to find my father dressed in a down jacket, straw hat, no shirt, shorts, knee socks and his dress shoes....painting a wall.  He looked at me, grinned, and kept right on painting.  My father was gloriously imperfect and my first best friend.

 Sometimes?  Sometimes I take walks in the cemetery where we put the outward part of him,  keeping company with big, craggy trees, and I follow the paths that curl around the stones that etch bare details of the lives that they stand for.  I often wish each marker had a button I could push and the voice of the person could tell me, in his own words, what life had taught them; what they would want me to know.  I struggle inside my head at times, thinking about the accomplishments they strove for and won,  the hard things they overcame, the memories they made.  When I'm telling God truthful,  I tell Him how much I trust Him, how thoroughly I know He loves us, and yet......when it comes to the end, it never seems "enough", doesn't quite seem "fair".   What was it all for, God?  And, honest?  I wish He'd taken someone else; not dad.  Not my dad.

I don't fear asking those questions of God.  And even more, I don't fear not getting an answer that pacifies me.  It makes me feel safe, though, to ask it right out loud.  Because the truth is, for me, that most of it just flat doesn't make sense.  I breathe relieved that I can say that.  I don't like pretending.  It wears me out thin and my smile starts to harden.  I feel Him more when, rather than scramble for the "why", I grab your hand and whisper "I don't understand it.  Stay here with me while I try and lay it down?"

When I consider the past year, the past lifetime with and now without my father, the things he taught me, the joy he gave me just by being my daddy, I sift through grateful for what I can tell you.  And when the questions come I remember this and hold fast.  "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be glory forever.  Amen.

I love you, dad.

I trust You, God

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