dewline | Fathers, In Death (Reply)

dianora, you evoked the memory.

For my father, it took about eight years from diagnosis to death. And that death fell on Christmas Day 2002. Two experimental treatment regimes, maybe three. A stroke at the airport in summer of '02 letting us know that the cancer had finally started losing patience, as it were, with Dad. Just as I was about to board the plane to San Diego for Comicon that year.

I think my behaviour at SDCC in the wake of being talked into just taking the flight as I'd already paid for the airfare, and then finally learning via pay phone at the Convention Center what had happened and why...cost me a few friendships. What there was of them, as I don't think I made it easy to be a friend even beforehand. That's still on me, though.

Anyway.

This is why I prefer Vince Guaraldi's music from A Charlie Brown Christmas to other seasonal tunes. It better suits my frame of mind about the season: hope and melancholy all mixed up together.