Gone from here, yes, but in a good way. I've been immersed in a novel manuscript that I should finish this very week (finished meaning it's now ready for some dusting, vacuuming, spritzing, and general polishing before it's off to my agent). I'm just not the kind of person who can work on two writing projects at the same time, so now that my manuscript is coming to a close, I'm so excited to get back into the swing of things here!
Some summer highlights:
1)Working with other volunteers from my district at the security line all day at the Portland Obama rally. It was great fun, even though I landed in the hospital that night with heat exhaustion. What? You should eat things and drink things when it's ninety degrees out and you're running back and forth helping keep a crowd of 75,000 people happy? Apparently I didn't get that memo. Verdict: worth it anyway.
2)We survived the one year anniversary of my father's death from brain cancer. My mom and I walked through the Japanese gardens, one of his favorite places in the world after serving his mission in Japan many moons ago, and we took sushi to his grave. The picture above is one of hundreds I took at the gardens. I wanted to capture a shot that conveyed how I felt about my dad and the hole he has left in my life the past year. The empty bench under the trees seems perfect. My goal is take a picture every year on the anniversary of his death and hang them on the wall above my stairwell. I'm looking forward, ten years from now, to seeing what the line of pictures looks like and being able to follow a visual timeline of my grieving process. If there is one thing I know, it's that the grieving doesn't stop. And that's a good thing. (FYI--what they say is true, even though I would have cursed anyone who dared utter it to me right after he died: it does get less painful.)
I have lived in terror of this milestone, but somehow it seems to have opened up my grief in a whole new way, a good way. Because here I am, one year later, and I still think about him every day as much as I did the day he died. For me, I am realizing that the fear of losing the memory of my dad, losing the day to day communing with him, is as much a part of the grieving process as anything.
During meeting a few weeks ago, I looked around the circle and felt the most powerful feeling: I knew that everyone in that room had experienced a loss, and if they hadn't yet, it was coming. Suddenly, I saw grief in a positive light, as something that unites me to the human experience. The closer I get to understanding the human experience and finding those things that make us all inexorably linked, the closer I get to understanding God.
(I think. I hope.)
I have missed my time here. I'm back, baby, I'm back.
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