I have so many amazing people in my life. The love is all around. My friend, Isabel makes chocolates, they are exquisite and devastatingly good. If I could put them all in my mouth, I would. She messaged last night to send me this picture of her latest chocolate hearts – to radiate love and help heal mine. So much love we could start a factory.

I’ve been struck throughout these new unchartered times, with the realization that, the genuine feeling and guttural reaction behind the words “I am so sorry” comes from a very humanly deep-seated want to snuff out suffering, in ourselves and others around us. Everybody has a parent – in whatever variance of shape and form that happened to take. Someone else’s loss reminds us of our own mortality or of a loss already experienced. To lose is inevitable. To love and be loved is a choice, scripted often by our own actions and reactions. We say we are sorry because we are, for them, but also for ourselves. The feeling is human and the ache is inherent. If you don’t have someone in your life, that the thought of losing makes you weak with foreboding, then…call me, because all I can do is offer to hug you – that kind of emptiness should be home to no human soul.

I am not sure yet that my chocolatey broken heart will ever really heal. But life will not be paused, and time adds decorative layers that hide all the soggy bits. My theory, is that death, acts like a vacuum of absence on the living. Compressing us together, around an emptiness that we can not yet follow into. The exit of such a loved soul creates a suctioning pull on everyone left, slamming us into each other and making our experiences mesh around the void left behind. We all talk more and past disingenuousness slither back into the shadows. Past conflict is best left exactly there.

I have a tendency to look for answers at the bottom of a glass. Sometimes those answers are sticky and require several glasses to really rinse them out throughly. They seem to be perfectly obvious, languishing playfully around when the glass is full, but tend to stealthily evaporate once you get to the bottom. In mercies much larger than small, Kareen never drinks, despite so many suggestive signals to the contrary. I get my love of an afternoon sip from my dad. I saw an interesting talk surmising that “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.”

I liked that idea. Thinking about dad sipping wine on an evening, I knew he was onto something. The universe always seemed to be right in his hand. I have to search these days for answers that were so recently just a phone call away. I didn’t factor in how tiring all this searching is and will be.

For better or worse, Trudy and I have my dads sense of humour. We are at best irreverent, with a solid slanting tendency to the darker, ridiculous edges of jest. If he yelled obscenities at you, suggesting you get the &%^* out of his house, then count your luck, you were very liked.  Many years ago on the beach in Tobago, he received a very angry, solid punch from a robust family friend. She had asked “how is Kareen doing?” and with a stone faced response, he said “oh she died you know.” A joke that was pretty standard issue with him, but clearly not to this lady. As he saw the tears of regret welling in her eyes, he had to quickly retract and tell her that he was joking, her tears retreated as quickly as her punch landed. That shit was funny for years. So funny that perhaps even posthumously his macabre sense of humour carried strong – after a few days we realized that the death certificate had erroneously put Mum’s name in the area of deceased – she had to drive down to the Registrars office to have it changed, getting there and pointing out that she was intact still alive. (Again that is going to be funny for years.)

The only glue holding the brittle splintered crevices of this void together, is the fact that now I feel like I can share every joke with him, as it happens, in real time. Because he is here, there and everywhere. I had some medical tests done this week, and had the awkward task of delivering the glowing yellow sample container to the desk in the busy doctors waiting room. So I loudly proclaimed “Hi, here is some pee for you, have a nice day” and walked out, grinning excessively. I had a good giggle about the expression on the poor lady’s face for hours after. Dad would have been so very, very proud.