Here be dragons

A blogger is born.
1979.

I am still navigating new, strange territory as my first Father's Day without my dad approaches.

When people say, "you will never be the same," I now know exactly what they mean. This isn't a club I was looking forward to joining. The Dead Parent club. But here we are.

I think I have been doing ok adjusting to life without my North Star. My protector. The guy who knew ALL THE ANSWERS. He raised me to be resilient, that is for sure. And that I have been these past 6 months since he died.

The best I can do is continue to live my life in a way that made him proud. To do what I love, and like he frequently said, "You are livin the dream." There is this thing about life: It goes on. My dad would not want me to be sad all the time, and give up living.

I will never move on from such a loss, but I will GO on. There is a difference, I have learned.

But people are right. I'll never be the same. And that's ok. When I listen to friends complain about their parents, how horrible they are - I find that so sad. There has never been a moment my entire life that I EVER doubted my father's love for me. I know that there are so many who are not that lucky.

Just because a parent or loved one is gone, doesn't mean your relationship with them is over.

I found the below description of grief to really ring true. I couldn't find the original author, but supposedly it was a reply to some Reddit post.

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As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

1980
Seems I liked pony rides.
*FORESHADOWING MUSIC*

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall.Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

Still came to watch me show even when chemo was beating the life out of him.

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"Here be dragons" means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting dragons, sea serpents and other mythological creatures in uncharted areas of maps.