I think I've written before about how, after the first month or so of coming to terms with losing my dad, Mom and I began to process our grief over him no longer being with us very differently.
We had to say goodbye to him in June of 2022 after a long battle with kidney disease and other health issues that took their toll. Though the writing had been on the wall for quite some time, we were still in somewhat of a state of shock. I was coming to terms with losing a beloved parent - just a week before Father's Day that year, on top of everything else, and my mom was devastated over losing her life partner of nearly 50 years.
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I was having to shift gears in July of that year and try to move forward. Mom's health problems, which we later found out to be stage IIIB colon cancer, were becoming more concerning. While I focused on getting her to doctor appointments to narrow down the issue, she was still grieving dad, though she, too, knew it was time to find out what was going on with her health.
I had to put my sadness over not having dad around on the back burner for the most part, because - though I did still cry sometimes about it - I absolutely could not handle having both that and mom's health situation on my plate at the same time.
And after her diagnosis, my sole focus was on doing whatever we needed to in order to hopefully help her beat cancer. So outside of the holidays and the other special occasions where memories of him would pop up in my mind, my thoughts were 24-7 on mom's well-being and care, and trying to keep my head above water. Throughout that whole process and even to this day, mom would and still looks lovingly at dad's photos and talks nearly every day about how she still misses him.
Over the last few months, however, since roughly the three-year anniversary of his passing, I've been thinking about Dad a lot more for some reason, wondering what his thoughts would be on the news of the day, the goings on in Sports World, what he would think about the extensive work we've had done on the house, my exterior floodlight bulb changing skills, etc.
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I've asked mom if she thought dad would be proud of me, and how I've taken care of her and how I've tried to manage the household since he passed away, and she assured me that without a doubt, he was.
"You really think so?" I wondered in response. "I know so," she replied.
Since mom's always right, I have to believe her, I guess. ;-)
A few days ago, not long after President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, I was in the kitchen putting some things away when I thought back to the epic U.S. military flyover that happened as they both walked the red carpet on the tarmac of Elmendorf Air Force Base.
"Dad would have loved that had he been able to see it," I thought to myself, smiling.
Then I realized something.
As I walked to the dining room table, I looked at Mom and told her what I had been thinking.
She grinned and told me that she, too, knew it was something he would have enjoyed seeing had he been here to watch the videos.
"But he did see it, Mom," I informed her confidently, with tears already forming. "He just had a much better view."
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