It is eighteen weeks since my wonderful stepdad passed away - I can still not write the word 'died' beside him, in the same sentence. The raw shock and awfulness has faded, but I miss him terribly and still find myself in tears unexpectedly. I found some writing from three years ago, when I was visiting him and my mother:
A seagull shat on me today, I thought, at first, it was a giant raindrop on the back of my hand. I looked up, the sky was empty and blue. My stepdad said he'd seen the shadows of *two* seagulls. Hard to know if he had as he is retreating more and more into his own world (he puts the olive oil in the fridge, I take it back out, he puts it back in, I take it back out). Then he hung the bath mats on the garden gate to dry, they had been on the clothes horse, but for his own - perfectly valid, I'm sure - reasons, he wanted the clothes horse back in the garage, and the mats on the garden gate.
I remember him hanging the bath mats on the garden gate: a chemical engineer with a head full of equations and science, hanging the bath mats on the back gate.
*
So, to mark eighteen weeks without this lovely man, here he is with his identical twin in their beloved Greenland, probably 1933.
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