39 years ago today, my father died.

It was 1970.
On a Thursday.
He was 41.
I was 11.

He had been sick for several months before dying of lung cancer. But when you're just 10 or 11 years old, and measuring time to the end of life as you know it, those days, they fly.

The weather that winter was much like the one we are having this year. I remember lots of snow as I walked home from school that day. And Uncle Snooky's car parked in front of our house.

Where it didn't belong.
At 3:30 in the afternoon.

And it was cold.
A Thursday in February Cold.
The kind of cold that can stick with a girl, say, seven or eight years.
With residuals.

In the years after he died, there were times when I lashed out at him, for leaving me at the mercy of his grief crazed widow. A woman who knew nothing about caring for a grief-crazed child.

But mostly I was afraid
Of falling.
Off.
Any thing.
Any where.

Mostly always,
I was afraid.

It is February 5, 2009.
A Thursday.
He was 41.
I am 50.

And very much not alone.
So very much not afraid.

Labels: Deep Shit, Passages