It’s now been a little over two weeks since my father passed away. The little things are the most heartbreaking. I pulled out an onion to make dinner the other night, and recalled that I’d bought the bag of onions for the week I planned to spend cooking for my father. As I had headed to the store, he’d told me, “Don’t get anything weird, like sushi.” Little did he know I had planned hearty comfort food — shepherd’s pie, baked chicken and rice, chicken pot pie, fried shrimp. But before I’d had a chance to even heat up a pan, he started running a fever and we had to head to the emergency room.
It’s still hard for me to believe, after so many trips to the hospital and so many amazing recoveries, that this one ended so differently. We still have the magazine subscription vouchers he agreed to buy from Callum when he was doing fundraising for his school. Christmas was tough this year — what could we get him that he could use, even if he never left the hospital room? We settled on an electronic photo frame, which now relentlessly flips from photo to photo, even after he has gone from this world.
I miss him very much, and expect I will for a long, long time. He wasn’t perfect, by any stretch, but there was definitely some good there. He certainly loved my brother and I, and his grandchildren, even if he didn’t always know the best way to show it. And I know he knew we loved him, too.
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