The 40licious Bride: Part III

There's a blog I've been following lately, from a woman who has gone back to the UK, Ireland, I think, to deal with her dad's estate. She's still raw and so so sad. She's trying to figure out who she is now and what she's supposed to DO.

Those days for me were a haze. I remember taking so long to clean out his house. I'd go and bring friends to help and paint and we'd bring more stuff to goodwill and paint more and call the exterminator for the mice and bats that had taken residence. A contractor pulled the awful old shag rugs and left the floors bare, I think. The rest of the floors he took down to reveal the resplendent oak below. The next thing I knew, six months had passed. We sold the house at a pathetically low price.

I moved. I communed with my dad in dreams, often. Still do but not as much. Mostly, we are eating dinner and I am asking him if he is OK and where he is. I used to always be confused in the dream, knowing that he'd died but then he's right here before me.

I reserved a bit of his ashes in a cigar tin that sits in the feng shui helpful people corner of my living room. The ashes mean less and less as time goes on. He's not there. That's not him.

Holly, his partner of many years, my "bonus mother," has some of him buried in the yard of the home and vineyard she shares with her new husband. That's where we're getting married.

I guess I waited too long to have my dad dance with me at my wedding, walk me down an aisle, give my husband a hard time about taking care of me. He would love this, all the merging of the tribes, meeting Steve's family, seeing the cousins and friends that were originally his and that I inherited.

But parts of him are next to his cat, which Holly also buried somewhere out there. I like to think that the strong gravitational pull from 100 of his friends and family all concentrated in one place will make him come want to check it out, from wherever he is, and maybe stay for the champagne toast.

I don't know when I went from being A Person Without a Dad to being just A Person again. But hoping that woman in the UK gets there with as much grace as possible.