Trudy and I talk almost everyday, not because we are sisters and we adore each other, but more so that I can get a daily opportunity to check in and ascertain that she is in-fact, still very stupid. Once I can confirm this everyday, all is good in the world. For the past few months the little green bubble, announcing a new message or caller display from Trudy, filled me with dread and foreboding. I could not fathom the next serving of bad news or any more ugly unknowns. I think we both felt robbed of our fun sisterly chats, because in that time every happy we tried to make, was inevitably drowning somewhere in sad. We could not pretend to be whole, while he was not. Our family is not great at being serious, we get that from our dad. The green bubble on my phone this morning was Trudy, suggesting that I write a post, so that she could have something to read tonight. I expect she might potentially reconsider this request in the future.

I am in the process of collecting stories from some of Jim’s amazing friends, bottling glimpses of who he was before I existed. I only hope I can string those words together in a way that does his story a flicker of justice. I knew him for almost 36 of his 69 years and it’s a funny thing to consider the lives and experiences your parents had before you were born. I guess it is easy for ego to map out the timelines for us. I feel like I am seeing pictures of, and hearing stores about a man who, would have certainly been one of my best friends – my best, most unusual, most fascinating, most…weird friend. I still get caught daily, by all the things that I want to ask him and the realization stings my eyes and stabs my throat, every time.

The clarity of perspective offered, after we can no longer have access to something is astounding to me. What I would not give to sit and hear these stories, directly from him again. I would listen, this time, with all of my soul and heart and head and not just my ears. I miss him so much. I know it will get easier with everyday that passes, but I feel certain that no day will ever go by that I will not think about him. Why can’t we have this sort of clarity when the person is still around? When you can talk to them and ask all the questions in the world. To ask them all the every things that you never even knew you wanted to know. The human condition is so cruel.  Like trying to blame someone else when you bite your own lip and make it bleed. Our rude, proud, presumptuousness that there will always be tomorrow.

I have never put my conscious, memory forming eyes, on my dads beard-free face. I just simply have no recollection of him, ever not having a beard. It was his thing, like Santa or Abe Lincoln. His friend Don, has awarded me with the most mystifying gift of seeing a much younger man, slimmer, clean-shaven man, who was only just at the very beginning of a condition that clawed his back into a painful contortion; that he spent a lifetime defying the odds against. I wonder what questions he had then, and did they get answered in a way that I know only he can answer mine?

I look at my nephews and try to think of myself back at that age, when everything is a possibility, and the future is as open as the sky. I suppose it serves a great purpose for children to not focus and dwell on sorrow the way adults do. They have an uncanny way of pulverizing it all and laughing away the sadness – that our heavy adult hearts seem to be so endlessly ready to hold onto. Perhaps the more size and weight we collect in life, the easier it is for us to retain and attach to pain, like a fast drying glue. Children are so rubbery when it comes to these things; I need to be more rubbery and be less gluey-sticky-heavy. In the video of us all spreading the ashes, Callum – the youngest and most likely to grow up to be a monster truck driver or alligator wrestler – is running wild and laughing, he is able to heal at a pace that I find most enviable. But perhaps being able to heal that fast involves forgetting, and I never want to forget anything, ever again.